Magician: Apprentice by Raymond E. Feist
Published 1982 · 512 pages · 130,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Fantasy
How hard is Magician: Apprentice to read?
Magician: Apprentice scores 31 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 38 out of 100
- Accessible prose with Japanese/Mesoamerican-inflected vocabulary for Kelewan. Clear and readable.
- Sentence structure: 32 out of 100
- Straightforward commercial fantasy prose. Feist writes for pace and clarity.
- Abstraction: 32 out of 100
- Cultural clash and the nature of magic explored through adventure. Themes are dramatized, not argued.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Two complete worlds with distinct cultures, magic systems, and political structures. Dense world-building.
- Narrative indirection: 25 out of 100
- Multiple POV but clear and linear. The narrative follows the war chronologically.
- Symbolic density: 25 out of 100
- The rift as cultural divide. Tomas's armor as transformation. Conventional fantasy symbolism.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Feist writes with sincere investment in his world and characters. No ironic distance.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Originally one long novel split in two. The war is ongoing, Pug's development incomplete.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Multiple POV across two worlds. The dual-world structure provides clear organization.
How Magician: Apprentice is regarded
Magician: Apprentice holds a literary regard score of 58 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.