A review by thereadingwren
The Novice by Taran Matharu
3.0
3/5
My 14 yr old niece loves this series so I wanted to love it too, and I think if I was still a young teen I would have absolutely loved it. As an adult, not so much but I can appreciate what it is.
The thing I disliked the most was how overt everything was. The big themes here were oppression, classism, and racism. And how do we know that? Because in every chapter a character will talk about either the oppression they face or the overall oppression in society. Everything had to be spelled out in detail. I understand that this was written for a young audience that probably needs things to be a little more blatant but after a while it got kind of annoying.
I couldn’t help but make a lot of How To Train Your Dragon parallels in this. Scrawny teen works as a blacksmith apprentice, teen constantly bullied by other teens in town especially by the mean and arrogant teen, discovers rare demon/dragon that has no teeth, goes to school to learn about demons/dragons, big arena match to declare graduation from school, and there’s even a cranky weapons master that is missing a hand and foot! I mean, cmon.
Actually if you mesh How To Train Your Dragon, The Hobbit (movies not book), and The Hunger Games you’d get The Novice. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
The thing I liked most wasn’t actually the demons but was the friendships between Fletcher, Othello, Sylva, and Seraph. I loved them becoming friends, studying together, helping each other, and trying to stop the nobles from destroying everything. It was really sweet.
While I did love the demons I wish there’d been more on the relationship between demon and summoner. I’m a sucker for human/creature bonds.
In the end I just didn’t care about the world and I definitely have no desire to read at least two more books in this series; I feel like it’d just be more of the same.
My 14 yr old niece loves this series so I wanted to love it too, and I think if I was still a young teen I would have absolutely loved it. As an adult, not so much but I can appreciate what it is.
The thing I disliked the most was how overt everything was. The big themes here were oppression, classism, and racism. And how do we know that? Because in every chapter a character will talk about either the oppression they face or the overall oppression in society. Everything had to be spelled out in detail. I understand that this was written for a young audience that probably needs things to be a little more blatant but after a while it got kind of annoying.
I couldn’t help but make a lot of How To Train Your Dragon parallels in this. Scrawny teen works as a blacksmith apprentice, teen constantly bullied by other teens in town especially by the mean and arrogant teen, discovers rare demon/dragon that has no teeth, goes to school to learn about demons/dragons, big arena match to declare graduation from school, and there’s even a cranky weapons master that is missing a hand and foot! I mean, cmon.
Actually if you mesh How To Train Your Dragon, The Hobbit (movies not book), and The Hunger Games you’d get The Novice. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
The thing I liked most wasn’t actually the demons but was the friendships between Fletcher, Othello, Sylva, and Seraph. I loved them becoming friends, studying together, helping each other, and trying to stop the nobles from destroying everything. It was really sweet.
While I did love the demons I wish there’d been more on the relationship between demon and summoner. I’m a sucker for human/creature bonds.
In the end I just didn’t care about the world and I definitely have no desire to read at least two more books in this series; I feel like it’d just be more of the same.