I've been reading Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books for about seven years or so; I was keeping my ex-wife company while she worked on her fish tanks, and picked up Magic's Pawn
to read while we hung out. I jokingly refer to the series as "Pony Fiction", because it's pretty legitimate to describe the first book, Arrows of the Queen
, as "A little girl, who nobody in her strict household likes, finds a magic horse that takes her to the queen! And the queen wants her to be the special babysitter to the princess! And she has a lot of friends, including the magic horse, and a boyfriend she never really does anything with but he's ok with that and she's special with rare magic powers!"It sounds dire, I know, but they're entertainingly written, with Lackey taking a different tack on that basic theme in her several series set in and around the Kingdom of Valdemar. She does action well and, if the romance is a little bit predictable, it's seldom cloying and usually somewhat realistic (especially as she's somewhat leaned off the mystical Lifebond as a trope), with disagreements and miscommunications and actual communication solving more problems than it causes.
But, Closer to Home
. Lackey usually gives us about 3 books before the character slips into the background or into legendary status (q.v. Vanyel
or Lavan Firestorm
), but Mags is now up to six, with a previous five-book series called the Collegium Chronicles. Mags is a former mine slave who was, true to form, rescued by a magic horse and taken to a place where he learned to use his special magical gifts to become a Herald, and to function as a spy... thus the series title, the Herald-Spy. Mags is a colleague of the King's Own (a Herald-advisor to the king, somewhat akin to the President's Chief of Staff), and affianced to the daughter of the King's Own.In reading book, however, it slowly dawned on me that she was somewhat retelling Romeo and Juliet; two warring families, in the capitol city for the Winter Court (hoping to find spouses for daughters and a son, respectively), who simply cannot be in town without trouble starting. Mags, Amily, and the other Heralds do their best to keep things from going to pot, but humans are determined to be difficult, and a plot develops that could burst this feud into an all-out civil war. Things are a bit telegraphed, but I was thrown when she decided not to go the full Romeo and Juliet and more closely adhered to William Goldman's 'What happens when the most beautiful girl in the world marries the handsomest prince in the world - and he turns out to be a son of a bitch?'
.I enjoy the heck out of Mercedes Lackey books. They're fun, enjoyable reads that are nonetheless well put together and tend to somewhat meditate on the nature of power and its exercise. She's set herself a lovely world that she works with, finding new variations on similar themes, and expanding her own world, rather than breaking it, to introduce new things. If you'd like to start at the beginning of Mags' story, instead of here, start with Foundation
; I don't think you'll miss anything major by starting here, but I've always been a fan of the apprenticeship tales that she spins.
