The Riftwar Saga - Review
Link to the author's (R. Feist) personal website
Book 1: Magician
Book 2: Silverthorn
Book 3: A Darkness at Sethanon
Blurb: (From Book 1) At Crydee, a frontier outpost in the tranquil Kingdom of the Isles, an orphan boy, Pug, is apprenticed to a master magician – and the destinies of two worlds are changed forever.
Suddenly the peace of the Kingdom is destroyed as mysterious alien invaders swarm the land. Pug is swept up into the conflict but for him and his warrior friend, Tomas, an odyssey into the unknown has only just begun.
Tomas will inherit a legacy of savage power from an ancient civilization. Pug’s destiny is to lead him through a rift in the fabric of space and time to the mastery of the unimaginable powers of a strange new magic.
Review: I demolished, and I truly mean demolished, this series and those series that come afterwards in the larger universe, wile doing a summer course at university. My life for a month was just these books with some very weirdly times lectures sprinkled in-between.
So as a heads up, potential readers should be aware that this series is part of a massive universe of books. You don't need to read them all to have a satisfying ending, nor do you even necessarily have to start at the beginning, but as the first book is an absolute banger and I think it helps having context for later books, I'd recommend to start here. This context helps with the later Empire trilogy, which I have gone back and re-read multiple times.
This series does a perfect job of multiple origin stories. I loved the direction the story went with Arutha and Pug. Following a prince of a backwater province rise up when called to take on larger burdens is simply fun to read, especially when you've got parallel stories of a mage and knight coupled adventures. Some of this might read a bit tropey, but I believe solid series like these are why such tropes are so well known. It's been a long time since I read these books, so I can't remember too much of the story, but it contains Jimmy the Hand, which is a nonsense sales pitch that is hopefully sufficient, as he's a fantastically fun character to read about. This series is a big recommend for me if you're looking for a large traditional fantasy. You can dip your toes with the first book that I think is somewhat self-contained story wise.