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Summary
Summary
L.E. Modesitt, Jr.'s The White Order continues his bestselling fantasy series the Saga of Recluce, which is one the most popular in contemporary epic fantasy.
Powerful white mages killed Cerryl's father to protect their control of the world's magic.
Raised by his aunt and uncle, Cerryl learns that he has inherited his father's magic abilities. His abilities do not protect him, however. When Cerryl witnesses a white mage destroy a renegade magician, he must sent to the city of Fairhaven for his own safety and to find his destiny.
An intriguing fantasy in a fascinating world." - Robert Jordan , New York Times b estselling author of The Wheel of Time (Reg TM) series
Saga of Recluce
#1 The Magic of Recluce / #2 The Towers of Sunset / #3 The Magic Engineer / #4 The Order War / #5 The Death of Chaos / #6 Fall of Angels / #7 The Chaos Balance / #8 The White Order / #9 Colors of Chaos / #10 Magi'i of Cyador / #11 Scion of Cyador / #12 Wellspring of Chaos / #13 Ordermaster / #14 Natural Order Mage / #15 Mage-Guard of Hamor / #16 Arms-Commander / #17 Cyador's Heirs / #18 Heritage of Cyador / #19 The Mongrel Mage / #20 Outcasts of Order / #21 The Mage-Fire War (forthcoming)
Story Collection: Recluce Tales
Other Series by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
The Imager Portfolio
The Corean Chronicles
The Spellsong Cycle
The Ghost Books
The Ecolitan Matter
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Author Notes
Leland Exton Modesitt, Jr., was born on October 19, 1943 in Denver to Leland Exton and Nancy Lila Modesitt. He was educated at Williams College and earned a graduate degree from the University of Denver. Modesitt's career has included stints as a navy lieutenant, a market research analyst, and a real estate sales associate. He has also held various positions within the U.S. government as a legislative assistant and as director of several agencies. In the early 1980s, he was a lecturer in science fiction writing at Georgetown University.
After graduation, Modesitt began to write, but he did not have a novel published until he was 39 years old. He believes that a writer must "simultaneously entertain, educate and inspire... [failing any one of these goals], the book will fall flat." A part-time writer, he produces an average of one book per year, but he would eventually like to write full-time. The underlying themes of many of his science fiction novels are drawn from his work in government work and involve the various aspects of power and how it changes the people and the structure of government. Usually, his protagonist is an average individual with hero potential. Much of his "Forever Hero Trilogy"--Dawn for a Distant Earth, The Silent Warrior, and In Endless Twilight--is based on his experiences working with the Environmental Protection Agency. He made The New York Times Best Seller List in 2012 with his title Princeps.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The prolific and popular fantasy author adds to his Recluce series (The Chaos Balance, etc.), with this entry tracing the rise of an orphan, Cerryl, to powerful magicianship. That's a venerable concept, but Modesitt keeps it fresh with crisp characters and a consistent, well-detailed setting. The magical system employed here features white chaos magic, somehow connected to the colors of light, and the magic of order, which is black and associated with cold iron. The background is medieval EuropeanÄlargely preliterate, with guilds and apprenticeshipsÄbut Modesitt uses historical details to create a vivid, realistic culture instead of a stereotyped fantasy world. Cerryl's apprenticeships in a wood mill and, later, to a scrivener lend depth to his ensuing, more magical, adventures. Like many fantasy heroes, Cerryl is virtuous but has unusual magical potential, leading to opportunities but also to problems, especially from jealous apprentices or mages of the White Order. The theme of power, including its uses and misuses, and its various forms, magical, political and sexual, runs throughout the book. As the novel widens its focus from Cerryl's education to his involvement with war, intrigue and assassination, it becomes more colorful but less original. Still, Modesitt provides the requisite adventure and wizardry, plus people and places that are as true as they are magical. Author tour. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Yet another entry in Modesitt's popular Recluce series, one that upholds the saga's reputation for intelligence, occasional slow pacing, and increasing originality. It is the story of the youth of Cerryl, later one of the great white mages. Orphaned by the death of his hedge-wizard father, he is raised by relatives and later by friends, all of whom try to conceal or discourage his growing gifts. Eventually, he is discovered by the white mages and taken to one of their strongholds for schooling, and also for testing so severe that he may not survive. This volume in the series stands unusually well on its own as a classic and competent coming-of-age story. Longtime followers of Recluce will appreciate it more, however, because of the many quotations in it that refer to events covered in other Recluce books. Modesitt's approach to fantasy is an acquired taste, some say, but a great many readers seem to have acquired it, and libraries should accommodate it. --Roland Green
Kirkus Review
Another episode--the eighth so far--in Modesitt's continuing battle between White (Chaos) magic and Dark (Order) magic (most recently, The Chaos Balance, 1997). Young orphan Cerryl discovers that he has a talent for glimpsing distant places and people in odd fragments of mirror; and in a mostly illiterate society, he has a hunger to learn how to read. Apprenticed to a kindly miller, whose daughter teaches him his letters, young Cerryl learns the truth about his magic-touched father, and resolves someday to travel to the city Fairhaven, stronghold of the most powerful Chaos magicians, and there discover his destiny. A quality series that's settled into a pleasantly understated, modestly involving groove. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
As an apprentice scrivener, Cerryl discovers his inherent talent for chaos magic, inherited from his father, a fugitive white mage. Taken to study with the mages of the White Order of Fairhaven, Cerryl learns to harness magic from his teachersÄone of whom is bent on his destruction. Set in the same time period as The Magic Engineer (LJ 3/15/94), Modesitt's ninth novel in his popular "Recluce" series continues the epic history of a world where chaos and order vie for ultimate control. The author's low-key approach to high fantasy results in an intimate, thoughtful tale that belongs in most fantasy collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/98.] (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
I The brown-haired child clung to the long shadow cast by the ancient house as he edged toward the south end of the tailings pile. His eyes led him toward the barely shimmering oblong of light reflected from somewhere in the tailings against the rough planks of the doorless shed, a shed that had once held mining tools. His bare feet made no sound as he slipped from the shade into the late afternoon sunlight and over the rocky ground to the gray and reddish brown heap of stone and slag. After he went to one knee, his fingers brushed away the thin coating of dust that had half-concealed the fragment of mirror, perhaps half the size of his palm. He teased it out of the dirt and laid it flat on half of a broken yellow brick. He turned his head toward the house, but the door was closed and the front stoop vacant. He glanced past the next closest tailings pile to the south, checking the other piles of earth and stone and slag, and the abandoned mineheads, but the only movement was that of scattered summer-browned grass waving in the hot afternoon breeze. A lizard scuttled from where he had lifted the broken brick. The boy tensed until he saw the large brown stripe down its tan back. Then he smiled, watching as the lizard vanished behind a fist-sized chunk of slag. His eyes went back to the lizard hole, but no other lizards emerged. The hot wind ruffled his clean but armless and ragged shirt as he squatted on the lower slope of the waste pile and gazed intently at the fragment of mirror. His pale gray eyes narrowed. The oblong of light cast against the toolshed winked out. Silver mists swirled across the glass, thickening into nearly a misty white. A faint smile crossed his lips, vanishing as he tightened them, concentrating on the irregular mirror. "Cerryl! Stay away from that glass!" A heavy set woman, broom in hand, appeared on the clay-and-rock stoop of the house behind the boy. Cerryl did not move, intent as he was on the image forming in the glass. His mouth formed a silent O, and his eyes widened at the sparkling white tower looming over a green park. Abruptly, at the sound of heavy steps crunching across the ground, he looked up, his eyes flicking to the squat figure in clean but mottled gray trousers and tunic. "How you found that...suppose it doesn't matter." The woman's big hand seized his shoulder, and she lifted him to his feet and twisted him away from the shard of mirror. Her booted right foot came down on the glass with a crunch . All that remained of the window that had shown Cerryl an impossibly beautiful white stone tower was a heap of sparkling dust. His eyes burned with unshed tears. "Glasses, mirrors, they be tools of chaos and evil! Have I not told you that, boy?" Nall's free hand brushed a wisp of iron gray hair off her forehead, but her gaze remained fixed on him. Cerryl's thin shoulders drooped, but his gray eyes met hers, looking up to a woman more than half-again as tall as he was, and far burlier than even most of the sheepmen and peasants around Hrisbarg. "It was only a little shard, Aunt Nall." "A little shard. Like saying a little night lizard--one bite, one shard--that's enough to kill you, boy." Nall took a deep breath, then another. "How many times been that I told you to stay away from mirrors and shiny things?" "Enough," Cerryl admitted in a low voice, his eyes still meeting his aunt's. "You be the death of us yet." "I wanted to help," Cerryl said. "They find things with the shimmer glasses. You told me that Da said so." "Always yer da." Nall shook her head. "Poor I may be, child, but poor be not evil, and evil be the shimmer glasses. Even you know where that took yer da." She glanced toward the door of the house, swinging half-open in the light wind. "You come with me 'fore the soup boils over." "Yes, Aunt Nall." Cerryl's voice was polite, level, neither apologetic nor begging. "Child..." Nall sighed again. "Back to the house." Cerryl walked across the dry and dusty ground, a pace to her left and a pace back. He glanced toward another tailing pile, farther eastward. If there had been a mirror in one pile, what about the others? "No lagging, child." Cerryl followed Nall to the stoop, where she reclaimed the broom. She gestured with it, as if to sweep him into the house. Cerryl stepped inside. At the end of the main room of the two-room house was the hearth, with the cook table to the right, the narrow trestle table with its two short benches before the hearth, and a weathered gold oak cabinet with cracked drawer fronts to the left. "Not even enough sense to fool around where no one could see you," snapped the woman, closing the door behind the boy. "Your poor mother, no wonder she died young. Not a scrap of sense in you or in your worthless father. A white mage, he was going to be." Nall shook her head sadly. "Poor fool...thinking he was that them mighty types in Fairhaven would welcome him. Him a peasant boy from Howlett... " Cerryl lowered his eyes to the spotless stone floor. "How did you spy that glass?" "I saw its reflection on the side of the toolshed. I had to look. I just looked." "Aye, and that was because yer aunt was there afore you could do more, I'd wager, young fellow." Cerryl remained silent. "You men, even young. Syodor...even he..." Nall broke off the words abruptly and looked at Cerryl. "No sense in that. What be done be done." She pointed to the stool by her kitchen table. "Well, leastwise you can help. You're careful enough with the roots." Cerryl climbed onto the stool and looked at the handful of bedraggled golden turnips. His eyes flicked to the open shutters of the single window and the other tailing piles, then back to the turnips. Copyright © 1998 by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. Excerpted from The White Order by L. E. Modesitt All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.