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On my recent trip to my local Waterstones, I saw a interesting trilogy of books that quite appealed to me, called the Mistress of the Empire series by Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts. The descriptions looked good, and it ticked many of the boxes I look for. Female protagonist, lots of politics, intrigue and the like, but I've never read a Raymond E. Feist book before now, so I've no idea what he's like. So some recommendations would be nice before putting my money down and devoting a while to reading them.
So, has anyone read them? From the looks of them, they work as an individual trilogy without having to read the other books in the Riftwar cycle, but it'd be nice to know if I should read them first. Any advice would be muchly appreciated!
The first book, Daughter of Empire, rocks. It's probably the best book I've read dealing with medieval fantasy intrigue. (Mara, for all that she's a strong female protagonist, is *not* by any stretch of the imagination Xena, Warrior Princess. She threatens someone with a weapon, once or twice, over the course of three novels, but I don't think she ever really fights with one. That's the job of the people working for her, after all...)
The second and third novels are good, but as her political power increases, circumstances (read; the authors) conspire to place her in larger situations. It runs the risk of seeming a bit like some Tom Clancy novels, where the nameless bureaucrat protagonist 'accidentally' becomes President of the US, after awhile.
I like the first book best of all, and it's a fine standalone work, but the second and third books, for all that they don't impress me as much, are still better than about 90% of the stuff out there, IMO.
I grew up with a steady diet of female-oriented fantasy (since my mom had an extensive collection of Andre Norton, Anne McCaffery, Tanith Lee, Patricia McKillip, etc. on the shelves), and Mara is one of my favorite female fantasy characters, despite being neither warrior-woman nor spellcaster. In D&D terms, she's probably got levels in Aristocrat and maybe one in Expert, making her not at all the standard 'hero,' and very much not the sort of character I would normally be attracted to.
You don't need to read the Riftwar stuff at all to get into it, although events from one series do touch upon events occuring in the other. It ends up reading more as 'Easter eggs' for fans of one series as they read the other.
For the Riftwar books, again, the first, Magician (divided into two smaller books, Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master, but since I have multiple copies of the trade paperback, printed before they split it up, I never got those), is the best. Silverthorn is decent, and the third novel, IMO, goes too far over the top to seem meaningful to me. The characters become powerful enough that the situations they face just seem too cosmic to take seriously. But the first novel, much like Daughter of Empire, stands strong on it's own, and makes for a great read. (I've read it at least a dozen times, and both of my trade copies are held together by scotch tape at this point, as I've read them so much and dragged them across the country.)
Raymond E. Feist started off as an excellent writer of middle-level epic fantasy, peaked with the EMPIRE TRILOGY and SERPENTWAR SAGA and has been steadily going downhill ever since. The last four or five books (there are now a mind-numbing 27 books in the overall RIFTWAR series, divided into numerous sub-series) have been borderline unreadable.
However, the EMPIRE TRILOGY is excellent stuff, very well-written and with some smart and intelligent ideas going on. You may find having read MAGICIAN might help (some events in Book 2 of the trilogy are events from MAGICIAN but seen from a different perspective), but overall it is a stand-alone trilogy.
I'd also recommend MAGICIAN, to a slightly lesser extent its sequels SILVERTHORN, A DARKNESS AT SETHANON, PRINCE OF THE BLOOD and THE KING'S BUCCANEER, and then the first three books of the SERPENTWAR SAGA - SHADOW OF A DARK QUEEN, RISE OF A MERCHANT PRINCE and RAGE OF A DEMON KING - are pretty good. From the fourth and final book in that series (an unnecessary coda thing), SHARDS OF A BROKEN CROWN, onwards the overall series goes down the toilet.
It's also worth noting that outside of the the EMPIRE trilogy and MAGICIAN, Feist is, at best, the equal of or slightly better than best-ever-form Salvatore. He's not batting with the epic fantasy critical big guns like Martin, Bakker, Erikson, Abraham or Kay, but as a solid fantasy popcorn read, his early stuff is decent.
The first book, Daughter of Empire, rocks. It's probably the best book I've read dealing with medieval fantasy intrigue.
Ditto, this is a big thumbs up. It's on my "ever-re-read" shelf.
Ditto to both of these. My copies of all three books are extremely ragged from repeated re-reading. If you're interested in extremely political medieval fantasy, these are some of the best out there. There's very little combat, and the protagonist is really no one special in and of herself (not a warrior, not a mage, no power at all aside from a lot of political savvy and intelligence in general), which is refreshing in the genre.
By the way, I'm fairly certain that Feist only gets an author credit because it's his setting. The writing isn't the same style as his other books. So, not having read a Feist book isn't a big deal -- it's not really a Feist book, it's just set in one of his settings.