THE MISFIT APPRENTICE

A routine, clumsily plotted tale of a young magician struggling to harness her gifts. Expelled from the magician's school in Kestra, 15-year-old Maria sets off in a random direction but quickly comes upon Lin, an old scholar. He shakes up her preconceptions about magic before being imprisoned in a glass tomb. No one knows how to spring him, but a neighbor suggests that the answer may lie in magic scrolls kept in the hostile city of Casgarn. Off goes Maria, with mute young fellow student Tristan and a catlike, telepathic sirnee (``Seeek the maagic'' is one of its helpful hisses) for travelling companions. After several wonderfully convenient plot twists the trio steal three scrolls, burn the rest, and then lose the ones they have—but no matter, for Maria has her magic working; she demonstrates her power by subduing an invading army with an earthquake, then she and Tristan sneak off together Linward. Levy repeats ideas and phrases tediously, and moves his stock characters about in arbitrary, illogical ways. In a blatant attempt to stir up interest in a series, he recycles characters from an earlier book, Clan of the Shape-Changers (Houghton, 1994) and leaves a bewildering array of dangling plot lines and unexplained events. For uncritical readers, at best. (Fiction. 10-14)