Ithanalin's Restoration (Mass Market Paperback)

Kilisha is a seventeen-year-old apprentice wizard to Ithanalin the Wise, an expert in animation spells. With just one more year to go in her apprenticeship, she is frustrated at how little wizardry she's been taught, and frets that she's in no condition to begin the next stage of her career, as a journeyman wizard. Her master is kind but distracted, often forgetting to teach her all the common knowledge behind each spell, and he's often busy producing spells for his paying customers. That often leaves Kilisha as little more than an in-home baby-sitter and servant for Ithanalin's wife Yara.

With her frustration and fear growing, Kilisha demands that her master start teaching her the spells his customers pay for, and this time he agrees. On an errand to collect the blood of a grey cat (wizardry often requires odd materials), she returns hours later to find Ithanalin frozen in place, and all the parlor furniture missing. She soon discovers that his animating spell went very wrong when he tripped, spilled the magical goo, and animated several pieces of furniture with his own essence. And the furniture ran out the door when it was opened by a persistant tax-collector.

Kilisha, armed with few practical spells and missing big chunks of background knowledge, finds herself the only one who can set things right. The senior wizards are preoccupied with mass murder of wizards in Ethshar of the Sands (these events covered in Black Dagger) and have no time for an apprentice with spells gone awry. She must find, collect, and bring back the escaping furniture and learn enough magic to prevent their wandering again. On top of that, some of Ithanalin's essence transferred to a spriggen, a magical pest attracted to wizardry; spriggens cannot be held by any locks or bonds. Then she must master a new spell to bring Ithanalin back to his normal self. And to do so, she must learn a new tack toward problem solving, as Kilisha is a feet-first woman in a look-before-you-leap profession.

This is a fun read with a satisfying ending, perfect for vacation and holiday amusement.

The story is quite fun, a fast and always enjoyable read, with plenty of clever sequences arising from the central situation and the use of limited wizardly magic (such as Kilisha's way of using a love spell to lure back an escaped rug). Also noteworthy is the basic decency and commonsense of the various characters in the book. This is, I think,a particular characteristic of most of Watt-Evans's work -- his characters are pretty normal people, for the most part, and basically act like decent ordinary people we know, with to be sure the occasional foible. To take just one example from this book, we are introduced to the city's overlord, after a scene setting him up to be a lazy fop (semi-evil overlord model 3B, or something). It turns out, though, that he's basically a nice guy, who maybe gets a bit tired of long meetings. I do like this aspect of LWE's stories -- which is present in most of them, though you do get some slightly more extreme characters in for example the Dragon books.