Entertaining the Alien

9. Daughter of the Empire, Raymond E. Feist & Janny Wurts

This series came highly recommended by Dawn and Jason. While I enjoyed Feist's Faerie Tale, I managed to read only a little bit of the first Riftwar book before giving it up as derivative and dull. (The story seemed familiar: outcast boy in a medieval setting discovers he gets to learn to magic and eventually becomes all-powerful.) So, on hearing that the Empire books were connected to the Riftwar books, I was skeptical.

After a bit of a slow start, I enjoyed the first book of the series. The writing isn't spectacular (the POV shifts started to make me crazy), but the storytelling is solid--solid enough that I read all three books within about a week's time. As opposed to Feist's medieval setting, the setting of the Empire books is more clearly Eastern, something unique enough to me that I haven't gotten tired of it yet.

Overall, Feist and Wurts do a decent job of getting us inside the characters' heads, and of showing us why they feel what they do. I resisted the urge to mark up Dawn's copy with a red pen on occasion, but that urge got rarer as I went further into the story (not, I'm guessing, because the writing got better, but because the story got more compelling).