This time, light and fluffy fantasy by Dave Duncan, at the recommendation of Mike Kozlowski. Without any recommendation but that the author was good, I started with the first series I happened to find at Half Price Books, A Man of his Word. The opening volume, Magic Casement, follows the parallel adventures of Princess Inosolan as she is shipped away from her small kingdom to spend a year in Society learning to be a noble lady, and of Rap, her childhood companion and resident stableboy, as he comes to grip with magical powers he has only just discovered he has.

There’s a lot of good and very little bad here, so far: An engrossing system of magic with lots yet to be revealed. An Eddings-esque number of nationalities and nationalistic quirks (I haven’t decided if the nationalities are as internally homogenous as Eddings’ are, due to not enough information). A system of religion that may or may not be tied directly to the magic in some unrevealed way. A fun quest rife with danger. (Okay, that makes no sense. Plenty of danger, but fun to read about rather than oppressive.) Interesting companions and foes. A rollicking good cliffhanger.

My only real complaint is that the main character is unforgivably dumb at a couple of key moments. I blame the author for poor information distribution. He provides info to the reader via the character’s internal thoughts, at a time when the info is useful to solving a puzzle. And then has the character not solve it for a while thereafter. If it had been provided early on, before the character had the puzzle to solve, then either the reader would notice when the character did and nod sagely, or notice early on and have a sense of accomplishment. As it was, though, the info solved the puzzle to my satisfaction and made me want to shake the character for being so blind. (I’m making it sound worse than it was, really.)

I look forward to reading the rest of the series. It’s nice to have the occasional non-doorstop fantasy to look forward too, and nicer yet to have it not obviously be trash, as with all the Buffy or Resident Evil or Shatner books that I read.