Sunday, January 10, 2010

An Unexpected Apprentice, by Jody Lynn Nye

An Unexpected Apprentice, by Jody Lynn Nye

Left without family due to a monstrous attack, Tildi quickly discovers that being a woman in a male-dominated society isn’t to her liking. She disguises herself as a boy and sets off to claim an apprenticeship that was supposed to have been her brother’s, and finds herself along the journey. The disguise angle could have been fairly trite, but the author disposes of this fairly early, instead using it simply as a means to get an underdog character into heroic situations. Parallels to Tolkien abound—an aging wizard, a quest for a powerful magic artifact, Tildi is even a hobbit à la Frodo—but this never got as tedious as The Lord of the Rings did in places. While I don’t think this series is going to spark the same following as the one it apes, it does possess a certain charm.

First Sentence:
The merry piping stopped.

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