Magic's Pawn by Mercedes Lackey

A Semi-Spoilery Reread Review

A fairly good story of love and loss and abuse and recovery, I thought. Not the best representation of any of the above, but fairly good. Gets the ideas across, anyway. Also an interesting way to properly start a Valdemar journey.

I’m not really a fan of the Vanyel/Tylendel romance. It never really felt super real. It did feel rushed, though, which makes sense given that their relationship is really more of a mid-season finale type thing than a season finale, if that makes any sense. Tylendel needed Van to get to a certain point in his abuse recovery in order to ultimately serve his purposes… though the way I just put that makes it sounds like getting Van to that point was Tylendel’s plan all along. It was not. Guess that’s more the author’s hand at work. Anyway, Van needed to get to a certain point in order to have his powers and things activated in order for the later part of the story to happen. So instead of spending an entire book on Van and his relationship with Tylendel, the story had to fast forward through the relationship.

Although it is technically a spoiler, I feel like I have to discuss Tylendel’s fate, or at least the aftermath. It really sucks that his not-very-fleshed-out character wasn’t given a chance to do much besides care of Van and then go off and conduct revenge for his brother’s death. The aftermath of which brought me to tears, but not because of Tylendel. All the Heralds helping to get Van better was just… heartwarming isn’t quite the word, but it will serve. There were tears shed.

I am very glad Withen gets summarily told off by Savil, Lissa, and Van. He totally deserved every bit of it.

All of that stuff said, I feel like some of the early chapters are very choppy. They basically jump away from Van’s POV and into another character so we can get both some outside perspective but also character development for other characters. This happens most glaringly with Savil so we can get some Tylendel development. I think that’s actually part of what makes me not connect with Tylendel. We don’t get anything specifically from his perspective and mostly get told what he’s like and what his motivations are. I do feel like Savil was the character to go through for that, but it still felt weird.

The later part of the story with the Tayledras is interesting, I guess. We get some of how their society is set up, but not a lot. There don’t seem to be any overtly friendly hertasi about, which I felt was a little odd given how we got at least one in The Mage Wars and, if reading in chronological order like I am, Into the West. That’s really not a detriment, just something I noticed. Van’s training in this part of the story is alright and then his kind of Heraldic awakening, as it were, was okay. The villain here was mostly just a stock villain, so there’s that.

Overall, Magic’s Pawn is a serviceable intro to Vanyel. The story works on a surface level, but is somewhat packed.