Book completed
May. 4th, 2021 01:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeFairhaven Rising, by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. I finished this long book last night too, two long books completed in one evening. This one is the latest in the Saga of Recluce, and the fourth and concluding book in the arc about Beltur, which takes place 200 years or so before the founding of Recluce. In the previous three books, Beltur (a powerful black mage with strong military skills, and note that black = order, white = chaos, so being a "black mage" is a fine thing to be) had been forced away from his homeland, moved to another city, then to another, and eventually - now with his wife, friend, friend's non-mage wife, and friend's powerful young white mage daughter Taelya - was asked to administer the small border town of Haven. That was an origin story for the city of Fairhaven, which later becomes the seat of power for the powerful white mages of the continent, and still later is destroyed altogether.
So, I hoped with Fairhaven Rising that Beltur would found a university for mages of both colors, which had been hinted at in the previous books. Nope. This was yet another book following Modesitt's common formula - we follow a local peacekeeper/warrior with strong magical power on their daily rounds and military campaigns, and eventually all problems are solved (or postponed for a while) by having our protagonist self-authorize and carry out one or more magical assassinations of bad folk in power. The innovation here was that the main protagonist was Taelya, the little girl from the earlier books, now all grown up - and as far as I know (I haven't read them all), this was the first time Modesitt had his main Recluce protagonist be female. (He's had female protagonists in other series.) Even then, Modesitt stuck with his usual formula of giving the protagonist a more traditionally feminine - though still powerful - sidekick, although here the sidekick wasn't a love interest but rather Beltur's own daughter Kaeryla. Oh well. The founding of a magical university would have been far more interesting, as we the readers would love to know how Fairhaven actually got to be as we know it in later books.
So, I hoped with Fairhaven Rising that Beltur would found a university for mages of both colors, which had been hinted at in the previous books. Nope. This was yet another book following Modesitt's common formula - we follow a local peacekeeper/warrior with strong magical power on their daily rounds and military campaigns, and eventually all problems are solved (or postponed for a while) by having our protagonist self-authorize and carry out one or more magical assassinations of bad folk in power. The innovation here was that the main protagonist was Taelya, the little girl from the earlier books, now all grown up - and as far as I know (I haven't read them all), this was the first time Modesitt had his main Recluce protagonist be female. (He's had female protagonists in other series.) Even then, Modesitt stuck with his usual formula of giving the protagonist a more traditionally feminine - though still powerful - sidekick, although here the sidekick wasn't a love interest but rather Beltur's own daughter Kaeryla. Oh well. The founding of a magical university would have been far more interesting, as we the readers would love to know how Fairhaven actually got to be as we know it in later books.