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Jul. 24th, 2013 12:28 pmI reread A College of Magics recently, which I loved all over again, although also I had forgotten how very weird it is, pacing-wise.
A reminder/recap: A College of Magics is the one about a young duchess from a Ruritanian country who gets shipped off to British magic college by her half-wicked uncle, and then brings her best and most extremely British school friend with her to deal with her complicated Ruritanian politics and also fix some magical danger while she's at it.
Last time I read the book I thought it was like a three-volume novel, with school as the volume and wacky road trip as the second and Ruritanian politics as the third; on a reread, though, it's almost more like a two-volume novel, with the college hijinks very strangely divorced from the rest of the story. Like, Faris makes a whole bunch of friends, and has some teacher-mentors, and does some schoolwork, and after the first hundred pages precisely NONE of this is relevant except for one single friendship. The meat of the book is Faris and her Best British Friend Jane and her Hot Competent Bodyguard Tyrion having a fairly epic trans-continental adventure.
And it is pretty epic! The pacing stuff is actually just a sidenote to what I really want to talk about, which is ( spoilery )
A reminder/recap: A College of Magics is the one about a young duchess from a Ruritanian country who gets shipped off to British magic college by her half-wicked uncle, and then brings her best and most extremely British school friend with her to deal with her complicated Ruritanian politics and also fix some magical danger while she's at it.
Last time I read the book I thought it was like a three-volume novel, with school as the volume and wacky road trip as the second and Ruritanian politics as the third; on a reread, though, it's almost more like a two-volume novel, with the college hijinks very strangely divorced from the rest of the story. Like, Faris makes a whole bunch of friends, and has some teacher-mentors, and does some schoolwork, and after the first hundred pages precisely NONE of this is relevant except for one single friendship. The meat of the book is Faris and her Best British Friend Jane and her Hot Competent Bodyguard Tyrion having a fairly epic trans-continental adventure.
And it is pretty epic! The pacing stuff is actually just a sidenote to what I really want to talk about, which is ( spoilery )
