Magicians' Guild by Trudi Canavan

Just look at that correctly placed apostrophe! Surely we are in the hands of a master here? At least compared to reading "Shadowmancer"...

I've now graduated from children's books to blandly generic fantasy for young adults. Magicians' Guild takes place in a standard-issue Fantasyland city complete with guilds for magicians, theives and probably assassins. In this irony-free Ankh-Morpork lives Sonea, a streetwise teen from the slums who discovers she has magical powers. The titular (f'nar, f'nar! Titular!) guild of magicians must then track her down and persuade her to join them before she accidentally destroys the whole city.

The charm of Magicians' Guild is that despite being a long way from either imaginative or literature, it is never so badly-written that is gives you "the bump" and startles you awake wondering why you've been spending your time on such rubbish. Like all the best "dragon crack" it is very easy to start and very hard to stop. It also follows fantasy conventions exactly by being part of a trilogy. Bugger. Now I need two more books in order to find out whether the snooty magicians will ever really accept a commoner. And what about the Lord High Chief Magician bloke who is a thoroughly Bad Egg? I can see a trip to the Read and Return* bookshop in my future!

Let's hope I hurry up and have this baby before I end up regressing all the way back to Eddings and Gemmel.

*To my alarm, Exeter's read and return has a prodigious collection of erotica. While I am happy to purchase pre-loved books along the lines of "The House Plants of Gor" and "The Stainless Steel Rat Picks his Nose", I'm a bit chairy of second-hand porn!