Mass Market Paperback, 336 pages
English language
Published Feb. 11, 1986 by Del Rey, The Ballantine Publishing Group.
Legends told of how the evil God Torak had coveted the power of the Orb of Aldur, until defeated in a final battle. But prophecy spoke of a time when he would awake and again seek dominance of all the world. Now the Orb had been stolen by a priest of Torak, and that time was at hand.
The master Sorcerer Belgarath and his daughter Polgara the arch-Sorceress were on the trail of the Orb, seeking to regain it before the final disaster. And with them went Garion, a simple farm boy only months before, but now the focus of the struggle. He had never believed in sorcery and wanted no part of it. Yet with every league they traveled, the power grew in him, forcing him to acts of wizardry he could not accept.
I would have to re-read this series to fairly rate it, and I'm not going to do that. I greatly enjoyed it when I read it as a teenager, but suspect it would not hold up today, and given what we know about the authors today I have no interest in re-reading it to find out.
Kind of unclear what to rate this. It certainly wasn't spectacular. But for some reason I want to read the next book.
I think I find this series too full of clichés. Also while the major conflict threatens all the world, the minor conflicts seem so very tame and our hero Garion seems a bit too safe. All in all it reminds quite a lot of a D&D campaign.
It all goes like this: Some bad guy steels the "MacGuffin" and wants to wake the "Evil One" who will do unspeakable things. Our hero leaves the green pastures of his homeland with the wise old man and witchy woman collecting quite a collection of companions along the way. Our hero's companions are all princes and barons and sorcerors and important people. They travel through a bunch of different lands, meeting kings and always following the thief of the MacGuffin but …
Kind of unclear what to rate this. It certainly wasn't spectacular. But for some reason I want to read the next book.
I think I find this series too full of clichés. Also while the major conflict threatens all the world, the minor conflicts seem so very tame and our hero Garion seems a bit too safe. All in all it reminds quite a lot of a D&D campaign.
It all goes like this: Some bad guy steels the "MacGuffin" and wants to wake the "Evil One" who will do unspeakable things. Our hero leaves the green pastures of his homeland with the wise old man and witchy woman collecting quite a collection of companions along the way. Our hero's companions are all princes and barons and sorcerors and important people. They travel through a bunch of different lands, meeting kings and always following the thief of the MacGuffin but never reaching him, while miscellaneous minor problems occur. Also they are followed by a spooky magic fellow who seems to have it in for our hero and keeps trying to capture him - alive! In the second book he discovers he is not who he thought he was, he is the chosen one. Oh yes forgot: there's a prophecy. And for some reason his powerful companions do not use their magic powers to fix everything ... oh and in book one the MacGuffin is actually called the "Thing" because nobody wants to say its name. Last but not least: whenever our hero is in any "real" danger, there is this voice in his head advising him what to do.
