Od Magic

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Title: Od Magic
Series: ----------
Author: Patricia McKillip
Rating: 5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 328
Format: Digital Edition

Synopsis:

Brenden Vetch saved most of his village from the plague but he couldn't save his parents. He learned the magic of plants all on his own and now he wanders, listening to what the plants tell him. One day a woman named Od appears before him and tells him to go to her school in the big city, as she needs a gardener. show more He'll know the entrance by the sign with the boot on it. Sick at heart and ready for a change, Brenden goes and finds the door. He enters, meets a wizard and finds out that only very special people ever find the door with the boot on it. All the other students enter through the front gate.

The King of the city, and his ancestors, started the school in honor of Od when she saved the kingdom hundreds of years ago. Slowly they have usurped its powers and decreed that only magic they control is allowed.

A wandering magician enters the city, only to entertain. But circumstances set the king off so he sets his own wizards on the trail of the magician to either control him or remove him and his troupe (said magician performs magics of illusions for the crowds) from the city.

At the same time the princess is to be married off to the head wizard, a man who is controlled completely by the rules of magic that the kings have set up. When she realizes this wizard will never allow her her own small magics taught her by her grandmother, she runs away to find the wandering magician to learn outside magic and to gain her freedom. This sets the King off even more.

At the same time Brenden accidentally shows what he is capable of to the head wizard. Realizing what he has done, Brenden runs away. The Head Wizard chases after him.

Everybody ends up in the North Country where there are 8 Stumps, which are beings of immeasurable power but who are afraid of humanity. Turns out Od is their representative to Humanity so they can all co-exist. Brenden must help the human magicians look beyond the limits they've set for themselves so that they won't be afraid of unknown magic.

My Thoughts:

This hit the spot. I really needed a good book after the stinkers I had last week. I slid right into the rhythm of the story like sliding into silk pajamas. My mind and senses felt caressed by the writing. It was just plain soothing.

There was a LOT going on. Brenden's story, the wandering Magician, the Princess, the Stumps, Od herself, and all of the side characters swept along by each of the main characters. In a good way, it was easy to lose myself in the story. But I never felt like McKillip lost a thread or made a mistep there. Each character was balanced within the overarching plot and at no time did I ever feel like a particular point of view was too long or too short. It just flowed together perfectly.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, every sentence of it. I had no issues with anything, well except maybe for wishing it was slightly longer, but I feel that way about every McKillip book. Of course, she writes just the right amount for the story she is telling.

If you haven't started to read McKillip's body of work by now, then nothing I can say will galvanize you. You won't get any contempt from me, just pity. And trust me, getting pitied by me means you're pretty low on the totem pole...

★★★★★ show less

Strange things happen after Brenden Vetch arrives to be a gardener at a wizarding school within a repressive kingdom. A mysterious wandering magician appears in the capital; a princess balks at royal restrictions; a scholar uncovers peculiar details about a wizard's labyrinth; a soldier falls in love; one wizard contemplates rebellion while another watches for subversion; and Brendan Vetch tries to figure out the strange magic blooming within him.

Od Magic features about three completely separate plots (The Magician Tyramin Comes to Town; Princess Sulys Gets Married; Brendan Vetch's Excellent Adventure) that are loosely united and occasionally affect one another. All three stories center around the Od School of Magic, where the wizard show more Yar provides hesitant aid while the wizard Valoren provides paranoid persecution. Characters from one plot wander through the other plots, so there is not a complete partition between each sub-plot -- but it often feels as if there is an absolute detachment. A similar narrative trick was used in Ombria in Shadow, and I found it clunky even then, but I was not excessively bothered because the narrative chunks were both smaller and better unified. Ombria in Shadow was segmented in accordance with its triumvirate of isolated protagonists, who fleetingly encountered and aided one another as they all struggled toward a common purpose. There is no common purpose in Od Magic (beyond the nebulous idea that totalitarian dictators should perhaps be a tad less fascist, maybe, possibly), and the cast is both larger and less integrated. At points, all three of the main plots threaten to shear off from the greater novel, and I'm not entirely sure why all three were shoe-horned into Od Magic. They don't work together in any meaningful way. Ultimately, Od Magic feels like a jumble of cool characters and neat ideas that never grows into a coherent story. (With that said, the narrow-minded wizard Valoren was an awesome character and far more worthy of being the pivot of the narrative than mild Brendan Vetch.) show less

There is a certain comfort in discovering a new favourite author who has written a lot of books. Ooh, these will last me a while, I think happily. And there's a certain anxiety when I realise the number of books I've read is greater than the number left to read. What if I've already read the best ones and cannot properly appreciate the others because they don't live up to my expectations?
When it comes to McKillip's novels, this anxiety is greater because sometimes I like the parts of her novels more than I like the whole. I say McKillips are worth reading for the writing alone and I mean that... but I still prefer it when I reach the end and have no cause to be disappointed by the novel's bigger picture.

Consequently I was tempted to show more review Od Magic while I was halfway through, because I was enjoying it so and I wanted to write about that, unhampered by whatever I might think of the story's ultimate bigger picture. However, that required putting down the book and ... no, I couldn't. And I needn't have worried, because the bigger-picture was just as satisfying as all the things which added together to make that bigger picture.

Od Magic is gorgeously written, vivid and poignant. It felt subtly meaningful, as if it were highly metaphorical and yet not explicitly so. Quietly thought-provoking. Its characters were beautifully realised; even though the numerous protagonists have to share the narrative with each other, they seemed to be emotionally complex and convinced me that their lives continued beyond the borders of the story.

The story begins with a young man, sent to be a gardener at Od's School of Magic in Numis, but the story is less about him than the school of magic itself, and the impact of the king's fear of magic. It's about Yar, one of the school's teachers, who is beginning to doubt and question; Sulys, the king's daughter, who has just been told who she is to marry; Mistral, a performing magician's daughter; and Arneth, the warden of the Twilight Quarter, investigating the magician's appearance. Although these characters do not know each other and their lives are initially disparate, there is a strong thematic unity binding them - undercurrents about grief and power and choice. The mystery is about the story itself, not about how the strands of the story twisted together.

Sorrow was like sleeping on stones, he decided. You had to settle all its bumps and sharp edges, come to terms against them, shift them around until they became bearable, and then carry your bed wherever you went. show less

If there's one woman I consider the mother of all things fantasy-themed, that's Patricia McKillip. I remember reading her Riddlemaster Trilogy and literally squealing like the fangirl I am because of the plot twists and the flow of the story. So of course I would go after other titles of hers. And I didn't regret this decision.

In Od Magic, we meet Brenden, a lonely man who came upon great magical power by observing the nature around him. Od, a woman so powerful and knowledgeable in the ways of magic that she built a school for people to learn said ways, too, finds him and asks him to become the new gardener at her school. Thus, Brenden travels there, only to stumble upon trouble, since his powers weren't gained by the school's education show more and are thereby considered dangerous. Add to that a travelling masked magician who illegally performs magic shows in the city's Twilight Quarter and the kingdom's princess running away in an effort to make her betrothed listen to her, and you have a mess in your hands spiralling out of control with every page turned!

I loved this book! Not only was it extremely well-paced, it also filled my time reading it with laughter and awe. McKillip is a master with inspiring quotes, and her way of storytelling resembles the old fairy tales, so it's like reading something akin to the classics every time I open a book of hers.

The characters were all complex and yet so simple in their flaws and stereotypes. None of them escaped the portraiting they had gone through by the author, and they stayed true to their shown personas, so despite having to deal with a big cast, the reader still doesn't get confused or lost. Moreover, the characters were not above some major growth. Most of them after they had acted wrong, which is another bonus of McKillip's writing - no man is prone to changing his ways, unless experience and life have lead him to it.

Now that the whole general thing is out of the way, let's talk about quotes. There was a particular line in the story that really made me shiver and brought tears to my eyes. At one point, Valoren, a talented yet very narrow-minded wizard, couldn't comprehend how Yar, his old teacher, wasn't seeing the danger in the ancient magical beings they found. And it was then that Yar told him, that those creatures Valoren so feared, were scared of him. Probably more than he was of them!

Do you people see the meaning those words, or was I the only one with the theory on it?! Yar was stating, loud and clear, that while these beings of unimaginable power could very well end Valoren in the blink of an eye, they still trembled at the possibility that Valoren would decide to destroy them. It goes to show that, just because we see someone bigger and stronger than us, someone we know can outdo us and squash us like bugs, it doesn't mean that said someone doesn't have their own insecurities and fears. We consider some people dangerous, but have we ever stopped to think that maybe, just maybe, those same people might think the same of us? In a social level, especially these days, that line of Yar's speaks volumes of what true humanity really is.

Before I finish this review, there's one last thing I want to mention: the end scene. Oh my God, that ending was spectacular! I love circular stories, and this one wasn't an exception. Whenever a story ends in a similar or the same way that it started, a good portion of my brain cells is singing hallelujah and throwing flowers out of handmade straw baskets!

All in all, a great book. Perfect for cuddling up in your bed with right before you go to sleep. show less

This didn't grab me right away. But as I read, it began to exert a subtle, powerful hold on me. McKillip's writing style is breathtaking. I turned page after page awash in flawless descriptions of magic, wizards, nature, emotions, and sensual impressions. The characters are strong and beautiful as they confront the rigid, hoary structure of outdated laws that inhibit their spontaneity and deeper powers. It's a story about change even in something as intrinsically mutable as magic itself, and it's woven to the end with heartwarming and laugh-at-loud twists that left me chilled and deeply affected. This book will stay with me for a long time.

Reading this book is like having someone hug my brain. Yes, that sounds kind of gross, but I become fully immersed in it. It's best not to read on a train, though, as I will miss my stop.

A novel of how 'A Good Idea' (Wizards' school) became entrenched in rules and blinkered thinking. The new gardener, (Brendan Vetch), epitomizes outside-the-box thinking so he ultimately flees. The teachers who should have been brilliant are prodded by an upstart student who challenges all the conventions and ultimately leads the main protagonists to face their prejudiced thinking and reach enlightenment.

Lost a star because the novel seemed like two stories running concurrently rather than meshing a little more tightly earlier in the narrative. I really liked the aspects of both plots, but Brendan and his time at the 'magic' school were often sublimated in the story about the 'wild magics' in the lower city. Maybe the themes were the show more same but the duality muddied the plot. Despite these niggles, I return to this book for re-reading because there is joy, enlightenment, adventure in a well-crafted world that feels very plausible. show less