Magic's Pawn

  Fantasy is my favorite genre, but I will admit that I have a blind spot to what that genre was like post-Tolkien pre-Jordan.  It seems like for most fantasy readers you can go straight from LOTR to WoT and you won't miss anything important.  For my entire life up to this point I was one of those readers, but after seeing a nice omnibus version of Mercedes Lackey's ‘The Last Herald-Mage' trilogy on the shelf of my local Barnes and Noble I decided to change that.    That was overall a good decision because this book is real good.  It's just really nicely written fantasy full of lush descriptions of fantastical places, a cool magic system and some major conflicts.  In many ways it ticks off every box that you'd expect a fantasy novel to check off but when the quality is this good it's hard to care.  Stereotypical fantasy can still be good if it's well-written and Lackey is someone who just gets how to write a story.    In many ways this book is stereotypical, but the way it isn't is what truly elevates it.  It's good that I'm reading this book in June because it is literally  gay.  Further research tells me that this is the first fantasy book ever published with a gay protagonist.  Lackey's introduction at the beginning of the omnibus says that many people have written to her about how this book and trilogy as a whole helped them come to terms with their own sexualities and I'm really happy that this book has had such a positive impact and I can totally see why.  Lackey does a wonderful job writing Vanyel's homosexuality.  She makes it very clear that the romance between Vanyel and Tylandel is totally natural and that the love they feel for one another is totally legitimate.  A message like that is important even today and I can't imagine being a closeted teenager in the 80's reading this.  Lackey downplays her own greatness in the introduction but I still think she deserves a lot of credit.    All in all this is a really strong start to what is sure to be a great trilogy.