Mistress of the Empire (Hardcover)

When I first read Daughter of the Empire, I had just finished reading Darkness at Sethanon. I was looking for something more of the Kingdom, and was really just settling for something about the Tsurani Empire. I was hooked very quickly and this became one of my favorite series.

Some earlier critiques have suggested that the is excessive repetition of themes and plot in the book, even to the extent that it became boring. I agree with this to some extent, but believe they have missed an important point.

Throughout the books, the idea is that this is a culture steeped in tradition. It is stagnant and rotting with self-inflicted wounds. Mara sees her only route to survival and the only hope for the survival of her people in the evolution of their culture. In addition to the political machinations of those who seel to capitalize on her weakness, she also has to deal with the powerful who resist her revolutionary ideas.

The repetition is intentional, the reader truly sees the problems of the continuous political battling and feels the frustration that is necessary for their joy at the resolution. I would say the Janny and Raymond have truly tapped into the psychology of the READER.

Mara is one of the most well-developed characters I have ever seen in this genre. I can say that I began responding as though I loved her. I felt her pain, wept for her nobility and sacrifice, cheered her successes and mourned her losses. When the stories were over, I actually missed her.
Rarely in this genre are strong female characters allowed to be -female. Usually, strong woman are shown to be strong in the way that they can act like men. Mara is different. She is strong in her femininity and tough as nails as a woman. The fact that so many men (readers that is) fell in love with her, tells me Wurts and Feist put the story together very well.

I am usually a tough sell for emotional involvement in stories, but certainly got caught here. Anybody who loves fantasy and does not read this is missing something. Any Raymond Feist fan who misses this is missing something important. Oh, I know some of the other side tales (Voyager publications: Honoured Enemy, Jimmy the Hand, Murder in Lamut) were not up to Feist (though I still enjoyed them), but the Empire series is at par with Feist or perhaps even better than some of his stories.

Read it for the incredibly strong female character that always remains a woman and never becomes a man to be strong.

To be honest, over the course of "Mistress" I simply grew bored of how events developped because they always appear to follow one and the same scheme: One urgency follows the other, Mara gets pushed to 'dare the unprecedented', desaster threatens and yet in the end Mara gets everything she aimed for (due to her 'innovative' actions and the usual heroics of her following) plus some unexpected but welcomed boons less a good scale of sacrificial deaths by people close to her household and heart. Good grief, gimme a break - dreaming must be allowed because after all this is fantasy literature, but did Mara really need to end up seeing her legacy on the emperor's throne, to win the favor of the most powerful mage of both Kelewon and Midkemia (though I feel that co-author Feist simply couldnt resist to give his favorite protagonist Pug a weightier appearance), to gain the protection of the Gods rendering herself virtually invincible and to regain her lost love Kevin due to the cheapest case of deus-et-machina-like intervention by the author?

I really think 'No', because "Mistress" still holds enough depth to make it a really good fantasy novel. Arakasi's incursion into the assassin fortress is gripping as anything and his ensuing affair with a beautiful slave girl is heart-breaking. The world of the alien Cho-ja, Lord Jiro's and his spymaster's plotting, and the revelation of the real purposes of the machinations of the magicians' assembly and everything that results from that are pretty good stories and settings within themselves. But alas Janny Wurts overshadows everything with Mara's greatness (even though Wurts tries to justify all of Mara's actions by purely being motivated out of necessity, survival and her concern for the well-being of the empire, but, sorry, I just dont buy that any longer) and therefore the whole story simply looses much of the usual credibility that marked "Daughter" and "Servant". A little bit less Mara would have maybe been better for the conclusion of this else spectacular fantasy trilogy.