Review: Ithanalin's Restoration

Ithanalin's Restoration by Lawrence Watt-Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A return to lower, more personal stakes after the last couple of books in the series (one of which I skipped, because it didn't sound like something I would enjoy). A wizard's spell goes wrong and distributes his soul (or equivalent) between a number of household objects, most of which then flee the house and go missing. The wizard's young (late-teenage) apprentice must track them down and perform a restoration spell to get him back. The title kind of gives away that she succeeds, but how she succeeds is the enjoyable bit: she exhibits determination, cleverness, the smart use of her resources (including spells, friends, and a new potential love interest), courage, and a level of forethought that is, for her, a mark of personal growth.

The timeframe overlaps with The Spell of the Black Dagger, and the events of that book distract all the senior wizards enough that the apprentice has to be the one to take care of this book's problem, which is a neat trick on the part of the author.

Like a lot of these books, a coming-of-age novel - more so in fact than most of them - but none the worse for that. Still, it isn't the best of the series so far for me. It's perhaps a little bit too much of a linear problem-solving quest, with not much going on beyond that. Still enjoyable.

View all my reviews