Every Thursday I go a travelling with the Fantasy Review Barn and various other wanderlusting and most excellent bloggers around the tropes of fantasy as part of Tough Travelling.  This week is all about novices:

‘Novice is a term in frequent use.  There are not only Novice Priests and Priestesses and nuns: you will also encounter novice healers and bards, and sometimes also novice mages… Novices are always young, frequently skinny and undernourished, and clad in robes.’

Novices – more tricky than I thought – I’m not sure these are novices – but I’m having them.  And, unfortunately the one book that actually has ‘novice’ in the title (by Trudi Canavan) I can’t actually have because I haven’t read – DOH!

The Magician by Raymond Feist – Pug – apprenticed to be a master magician at the beginning of the story (novice mage).

Blood Song by Anthony Ryan – Vaelin, in training to be a warrior of the Sixth Order.

Half a King by Joe Abercrombie – Jarvi – at the start of the story he is apprentice to the King’s Minister – which involves a lot of reading and a little bit of magic and is a role usually reserved for women.

The Book of the Crowman by Joseph D’Lacey – Megan – the keeper.  Not sure about this one – although she is definitely young and skinny, clad in robes and under nourished.

Feast of Souls by Celia S Friedman – the witch Kamala – she’s ambitious, she wants more than to be a witch – she’s wants to be a magister and so she becomes a novice to a magister in order to do so.

And, honorary mentions – Harry Potter – he has to be a novice!

Can I also mention Locke and Jean – they both were sort of novices to Chains – and on top of that they both had to frequently spend time with other religious bodies as part of their training.