Daughter of the Empire

I read the Riftwar saga by Raymond E. Feist last year. This year, William lent me three related books (oddly enough, there isn't a name for this trilogy), co-authored by Feist and Janny Wurts, that set out "an epic saga of the world on the other side of the Riftwar". The former was about the world of Midkemia while the latter was about the world of Kelewan.

So far, the only common character between Riftwar saga and the first book of the latter series, Daughter of the Empire, was Lord of Shinzawai's second son but he was mentioned briefly a few times in the passing in the latter and thus didn't have any impact on the story of the book. It sounded like he, or at least his House, may play a larger role in the latter two books.

I enjoyed reading this book. It was more about political intrigue than combats. Not complicated though. There were combats but few. However, what struck me as quite unbelievable was this:

The main character, Mara, had never been groomed to be the Ruling Lady of her house but was forced to be so at a tender age of 16 after the simultaneous death of her father and her brother. As expected, she made an error of judgement at the start of her rule by not listening to advisors who had served her father for many years.

However, after that one sole brief episode of weakness, suddenly she became an expert in the trappings of a ruler to the extent that once a while she even held back from discussing her plans with her advisors and she did it quite early during her rule (definitely within the first year after taking over the helm).

Either she was a natural genius at this or there is simply something wrong about this leap of improvement.