Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings

An orphan, Garion is left in the care of his Aunt Pol, spending his days in her kitchen and playing with his friends. He is logical and doesn’t believe in magic. He is haunted by a stranger who silently watches him as he grows up. As he turns fourteen the wise storyteller Wolf appears and convinces Garion and Aunt Pol to come away with him. Without knowing why Garion is taken away from the only home he has ever known and thrown into a mysterious adventure with strange new people. A quest has begun to stop an evil from destroying the world. Garion will soon discover his past, present and future, and also a new appreciation for the magic he refuses to believe in.

I started out really liking this book; I thought it would be a good fantasy novel. I think if I had been able to sit and read it from cover to cover I probably would have ended up liking it more than I did. By time I finished, I didn’t feel like too much had really happened. I didn’t like how Garion (who is 14 by the way, it took about 200 pages for them to say his exact age), was kept ignorant throughout the whole book, which to me ended up making him kind of whiney. There were so many different groups of people, so it was hard to keep track of everyone. I felt like I almost had to get a scrap of paper to keep track of everyone. Again, it ended without too much happening, and although you can tell what is going on or what will happen there were a lot of unanswered questions. There are two more books in the Belgariad series, I think I will read them and maybe as a whole I will enjoy it more.

I just wanted to add… I’ve read some reviews that compare this story to Harry Potter. This book was published in 1982, long before Harry Potter, so if anything Rowling got her ideas from this book. It is similar in that Garion is an orphan left in the care of his aunt. Although it doesn’t say it in the first book, it appears he will have some magical abilities. Another similarity is that the bad guy in the book is not named, instead of calling him “he-who-must-not-not-be-named” they just say that they can’t say his name. In the end though, they are totally different stories that just happen to have some similarities.

Reviewed by: Kathy