Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #897 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-29
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Customer Reviews

An enjoyable read
While the cover of the book put me off somewhat, I recently took the plunge and purchased this anyway. As fantasy novels go, its light-hearted tone and brevity make a refreshing change. If you want something that's a relatively quick read, with a good sense of humour, then you could do much worse than this book. It gets off to a good start, although it introduced a lot of characters and concepts a bit too quickly for my liking. The pace is quick and although the plot becomes slightly predictable that hardly detracts from the all-round sense of fun.

The characters are generally likeable, although it took me some time to warm up to our heroine. The ending is also very abrupt - while you expect it to lead directly on to the sequel, I would have liked a bit more resolution and came away feeling a bit dissatisfied. Nevertheless, it's a good start to the series and is good value for money - I look forward to reading the sequel.

Magic Lost, Trouble Found
Magic lost, trouble found is a book of strong and interesting characters placed in an equally solid fantasy world. This is more fantasy than anything but being set in the fantasy city of mermeia it has an urban feel to it.

The book follows a short span of Reine Benares life as she tries to work her way out of a rather tricky sistuation. She's a seeker, she finds things and has moderate magical ability, this doesn't bother our heroine and the fact that thanks to a friend of hers she gets lumped with a powerful stone that exponentially enhances her magical skills doesn't sit well with her. This book thrives on the difficult and sometimes funny situations are heroine gets into, she lands into one mess after the other but its her her attitude that really makes this book shine; she's a lead that exudes a great deal of control not only in herself but in how she manages to effect the situations she's manuvered into without being in your face and gun-ho, she's clever thoughtful and her first person narrative works well.

The narrative is descriptive and gives a good sense of a fantasy world thats claustrophic and atmospheric, though the world does seem a bit narrow.

The rest of the characters are without exception drawn perfectly, all of their places in the book are just right. The characters and plot develope very nicely and the next book is set up whilst giving this a good ending.

This makes for a strong read; I think why I like it so much is because of its subtly, this extends to everything from the world to the characters and particually Reines's love life, theres a couple of men in her life but her scenes with them fit in with the plot and don't feel stuck on. If you like this I would reccommend poison study by Maria v. synder as its got a similar tone to this.

meet raine
a new fantasy series of books begins with magic lost, trouble found, introducing main character raine benares. living in a typical fantasy city she is an elf lady and a seeker. a lady who finds magic objects for people. even though they may need to remember the old saying about being careful what you want. streetwise and cunning, she's caught up in a recovery of an object gone wrong. and as a result gets stuck with a deadly artefact and all sorts of people on her tale who are to get it.

The book runs for roughly 342 pages and is pretty much self contained although there's room for further adventures for the main character come the end.

Alas I can't quite give this five stars because whilst the main character is appealing and there's some nice ideas and decent world building here I didn't find it as smooth a read as I was expecting. The prose didn't quite grab and there are a lot of strange character names to take in.

But view this as a promising first novel and it's just about enough to make me try more by the writer. So I have her second book on order.