Polgara The Sorceress review

Polgara is the story of the sorceress Polgara, daughter of Belgarath and Poledra. Polgara is compelled to tell her side of the story of the past three thousand years of her existence after her father, Belgarath, chooses to leave out a few fairly important things from his telling of that particular history.

Polgara retells tales of her childhood and her journey into adolescence, recounting her first experience with the Tree in the Vale, and how she first discovered her ability to speak with the birds and other creatures in the Vale. She shares her feelings about her twin sister, and the loss she felt as life came between them. Polgara was destined for greatness, and she comes into her own as a powerful sorceress, a nemesis of a dragon god, and a guardian of something, or someone, rather important to the entire world.

Polgara seems to be a part of a saga of some sort, and this being what seems to be the end of that saga didn't make it a very good read as a stand-alone book. I cannot speak about how excellent or else horrible the saga may be, since I have not read it, but Polgara on it's own, was a fairly mediocre book at best.

Firstly, as I began the book, I was taken aback by the whole tone, the language, and the writing style, which was far too stiff for my liking. Polgara lives in a world that is not really described too well in this book, but may have been described in other books of the saga. Therefore, as I began to read, the author(s) combined contractions and more contemporary language with laughably confusing names (Belaran, Belgarath,Beldin,Beltira, and Belkira) and more "old time" language and phraseology. The interactions were awkward between characters, and the authors seemed to struggle with providing interesting details about the people in their story. Ce'Nedra, for example is described as Garion's "tiny wife/tiny Queen" multiple times in the Prologue. Unfortunately, they couldn't and didn't come up with much more of a description for her than that, despite the book's 643 pages.

When I start to read a new book, I hope that it grabs me from the very beginning and keeps me interested until the very end, and that by the time I've finished it, scarcely a day or two has passed since I was so engrossed by the story I was flying through. This was not the case with Polgara. While it seemed to tell a story that I would have generally enjoyed, there simply was not enough detail about the world in which the story took place, the characters spoke awkwardly as if even they weren't sure whether they were existing in the past, present, future, or even in a parallel existence where those things might be combined. I was happy to finish this story, but not because I was closing a book filled with new friends and enjoyable adventures, but because it was just too tedious to get through without the information probably provided in the other books.

So my rating is that this book is "okay" as a standalone book. If you can get past the things I mentioned before, you'll probably enjoy it. If you can't, then you, like me, will be thrilled to find that you've finished a book that you won't have to read again, and can now move on to something hopefully a bit more enjoyable.
/ [Nioniel]

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