Servant of the Empire, by Raymond E. Feist

Servant of the Empire, by Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts

Published in 1990, by Doubleday

Listened to sometime in October

580 pages, which is a little more than thirty hours of audiobook.

This is the second story of Mara of the Acoma, who becomes a mother and a woman in her own right in this book.

Mara discovers love with an unlikely partner, Kevin of Zun, who is a captive of the war with the world of Midkemia. In Kelewan, the captives are slaves and slavery is a condition that cannot be removed. Her relationship with a man so different and so below her social rank is made of up and downs, but Mara must bow to the traditions of her Empire and can’t free the man she comes to love.

There is still struggle against the Minwanabi family whose head swore a blood oath to the Death God to annihilate Mara and the Acoma family. The young woman must use all her wits and her thirst for change to accumulate power and prestige and defeat this implacable foe, both in battle and on a political level.

This continuance of a fantastic tale of political games doesn’t disappoint, and one can only root for Mara, heroine extraordinaire.

My opinion : 4 / 5 for wonderful story though sometimes long, very well read.

A Jane Austen Education, by William Deresiewicz

A Jane Austen Education, How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter by William Deresiewicz

Published in 2011, by Penguin Press

Read the 6th of October

This is one of the first non-fiction book that I read in years, because I’m usually not very interested in the real world enough to read something that isn’t fiction.

But this book is very nearly the memoir of the author who begins his journey as a sullen and arrogant boy of already twenty-six. I say ‘boy’ voluntarily because from his attitude, his behaviours and his thoughts about the world, he was by no means a man yet.

He disregarded Jane Austen as simplistic and romantic literature, preferring the more symbolic and modern works of male authors that were, according to him, more valuable. Until…

Well, until he actually read Jane Austen. The simple stories were suddenly not so simple, but subtle both in the development of the characters but also in the reflection the characters offered the reader about her life, even a modern life.

Emma was an eye-opener about how his way of being affected others. And I won’t reveal what the other novels taught the author, but as he finished his reflections (and his dissertation) on the subject, he had become a man open to true friendship and true love.

My opinion : 3 / 5 for not being a too bad read, despite obviously not a favourite.