Magic's Pawn

Valdemar: The Last Herald Mage, Book 1

By: Mercedes Lackey

Narrated by: Gregory St. John

Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

In Magic's Pawn, an ancient age in the history of Valdemar comes to life - an age when the kingdom was ravaged by the ungoverned fury of bandit warlords, ferocious ice dragons, and the wild magic of wizards. A new addition to Lackey's Valdemar kingdom - and her most powerful series to date!

©1991 Mercedes R. Lackey (P)2012 Audible, Inc.

Good Story, horrible voice acting

I got this book to introduce my guy to one of my favorite Lackey trilogies. It is an amazing story and he's actually enjoying it far more than I thought he would. However... The narrator. He mispronounces any word he can get away with, such as "bow." There aren't breaks or any clues for scene shifts, the voices are pretty much all the same, and he seems just plain out flat to me. Luckily I have read the books a few times so I know what is going on so I can just pause and tell him what's happening. So many times he just turns to me and has to know what just happened, as he just switched scenes multiple times in rapid succession. Even I would have been lost without previous readings and a handy copy.

Great Story, Horrible Narrator

The story is great filled with nuanced struggles of youth, being gay in a society that is not accepting of it, and then being more powerful that the main character knows what to do with.

The biggest issue I had was the NARRATOR. AWFUL would be an understatement. He's slow, pauses at the weirdest times, and has a jarring cadence and voices that make no sense at all. I finally put it on 1.5 speed to minimize the dramatic pauses and glacial speaking pace.

pawn of magic

I have listened to this book many times and each time I enjoy it more it brings tears and laughter and the story is worth listening to I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys the valdemar series. but even if you've never heard of the series and this is your first book it is definitely worth it.

This book (this series) is outstanding!!!

The emotion, the story, the rite of passage it holds is amazing! I truly wish they would make this into a movie. I want so desperately to see it on the big screen. LGBTQIA perwons would be impressed by what Mercedes Lackey has created here and she did it for her own child who is a member of the community. I haven't seen a hero like Vanyel and on-screen before and it's high time we all see it as told from these pages. If you ever want to know the mind of closeted person suffering in isolation and from the cruelty of world around them, this book does that with great sensitivity and empathy.

A disappointment...

I had read other books by Mercedes Lacky and enjoyed them, but this book disappointed me. The writing was not bad, and the narration was good.
If you want to read more you will have to be spoiled, so scroll down.










SPOILER WARNING
The problem that I had with the book was that the main character turns out to be very homosexual. This is not a fatal flaw in a book and I would not tell other people it is terrible or anything, but I did not like reading a book and finding out that the main character who I had grown to like and feel for had feeling that were so foreign form mine and which I don't have any desire to explore. I also don't like reading books in which the characters enjoy feeling pain or where then lust after children or where they have self harm issues among other things.
So all that to say, If you dont want to read a book where the main character is very gay, dont read this one.

Great story - not so great rendition...

If you could sum up Magic's Pawn in three words, what would they be?

Main Character needs to grow up

Who was your favorite character and why?

Savil Ashkevron. She was strong enough to not care about what others thought.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Gregory St. John?

Gerard Doyle.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Would have been if... (see additional comments...)

Any additional comments?

The narrator paused when he shouldn't have and didn't pause when he should have. This could have been editing. Sometimes there was a pause when there should not have been: "he climbed down the back........ stairs" (listener starts to question how anyone can climb down a back and finally the sentence is completed. Oh, okay. He climbed down the stairs!!!).

There were not pauses between separate segments when there definitely should have been. Whenever there was a scene change, the lack of separation created confusion in the mind of the listener.

This broke the flow of the story and made it difficult to fully enjoy.

Great story, okay narrator

I love this series so much, and this is one of my favorite books of all time. This was an okay reading, but the narrator didn't pause enough between scene changes/new paragraphs. It got confusing a few times when it was a new scene but he didn't pause at all. I don't think this was so much the narrator's fault as it was whoever edited the audio. That was really the only fault I found with this audiobook!

Great story, weak reader

The story is a wonderful epic, one of Lackey's best. That makes it doubly difficult to listen to the jarring, distracting mispronunciations from the reader.

Oh, he's CLOSE, but the more difficult words trip him up. He'll get the adjective "close", where the word used is the VERB, with a "z" sound to the "s", he mistakes a reference to a bow and arrow to a courtly bow, pronounced "bahw", instead of "bohw".

But the worst was his maddening mangling of Vanyel's last name. He typically says "ASS-krehv-on", instead of "ASH-keh-vron". Lackey is very predictable with name pronunciations. With her works, you truly do have to simply sound them out.

I know, it sounds petty. But I love visualizing the story as it's read, and mangling important words breaks the vision. It reduces enjoyment of the story.

Outstanding audiobook!!

I read The Last Herald Mage Trilogy in the 1990s; it was a gateway to the beautiful, fanciful, and immersive world of Mercedes Lackey. I recently had the privilege of listening to Gregory St. John narrate the outstanding, unabridged recordings of Magic's Pawn, Magic's Promise, and Magic's Price. His excellent narration adds an additional dimension to the already multi-faceted universe of Herald Vanyel in Valdemar. I cannot recommend this series highly enough!

pronunciation problems

the reader is not saying words correctly. Ekele is Ek-ell-ey, Vanyel Ashkevron is Van-yul Ash-kev-Ron (not Ash-kre-von). the reader did not do his best.