Her main contribution is her ability to look at all types of magic and use them together. She just has a very different way of looking at things from everyone else. This is the first book where she has to also seriously deal with some romantic issues. Lan has also changed quite a bit throughout the series.
He is no longer just concerned about power, but wants to learn new things and figure out how to do something great. All of the other characters are wonderful, interesting, and engaging to read about. Their journey through the Far West is a good one. The plot is well done and brings together a number of elements from the previous two books nicely. I had two complaints with this book. The first is it takes absolutely forever to get to the expedition to the Far West in the book.
The second is that when they discover the problems they are able to bandage it but not actually fix it. This made the ending feel a bit rushed and incomplete. There is an Epilogue that did a good job of tying up some of these unresolved issues, but again it just felt very dense and rushed. It was odd considering the deliberate pace of the rest of the book. Overall I enjoyed the way this wrapped up this series and I enjoyed this series overall. This is one of the few series where I kept thinking I would love to visit this world and travel with these characters!
I enjoyed the world, the engaging characters, and the fascinating magical animals. My only complaint really is pacing Jan 10, Shoshana rated it really liked it. I loved this conclusion to the Frontier Magic trilogy! These books are so fun. Like the other two, there's a lot of dawdling in the first half of the books, as Wrede lingers over slow building changes and Eff's daily life as the years go by.
Weirdly, this stuff is almost as enjoyable as the second half, where they're actually doing stuff. Eff is a great character, and there are several other characters who get some more arc in this book, which is great. I also love the way Wrede has layered and b I loved this conclusion to the Frontier Magic trilogy!
I also love the way Wrede has layered and built on Eff's explorations with other kinds of magic, and the way that plays into the climaces of the plot but without it being a panacea. Wrede also does a pretty good job incorporating characters of different ethnicities into the series by this point, which is important because this is a series that takes place in a version of America where there were no Native Americans, and while this is absolutely logical within the world-building, it's obviously problematic.
I appreciate Wrede showing that she's not only interested in white people, and that she's willing to take on racial dynamics and develop characters of color well. The reason this gets four stars which are really three and a half instead of five four and a half is because it doesn't FEEL like the last book in a series!
It's not a cliffhanger, but it IS open-ended, and there is a LOT of this world left to explore - not even in the broad sense of what's going on at this time period and others across the whole globe although a Naomi Novik-style 9 book global exploration in this alternate world sounds GREAT , but just in the sense of these characters, this frontier, the next ten years. And I haven't heard that Wrede plans to write any more books in this world. If she ever writes more, I may upgrade this to five stars.
Jan 09, Miss Clark rated it liked it Shelves: adventure , fairytale-fantasy-sci-fi-mythology , au-alternate-timeline. Conclusion to Wrede's Frontier Magic series. Not as exciting personally for Eff as I had anticipated. Nor as spectacular a climax overall, though the realization that Eff comes to about magic was monumental and the fact that she alone looks at it in that way. She and William whom I always thought would end up together were a quiet, lovely pairing. I had very much hoped to see more interaction between Lan and Eff, but alas.
I liked how much Wrede acknowledges the pull of family, the ties that binds Conclusion to Wrede's Frontier Magic series. I liked how much Wrede acknowledges the pull of family, the ties that binds us to them, the affection even when rancour and disagreements abound , how they influence us and have a sway upon Eff's decisions, but yet ultimately while they influence her, all her choices are her own and her parents make it clear to her that they will abide by her choices and they support her.
So very refreshing to see a good, solid family. No, but realistic. Also, I liked how Eff told off her two older sisters when they tried to shove an anti-pregnancy charm on her she leaves for the trip. Aghast and disappointed by their low opinion of her choices and will-power, she tells them to shove off. Wrede ties up the issue with the magical creatures on the rise, but does leave the story open to further exploration and adventure for all. Jul 19, First Second Books added it Shelves: gina.
Eff continues her exploration of the far west, and this book again contains dragons whole packs of them! My favorite new magical creature of the book: the invisible disappearing giant foxes. Can we have more of them, please? This are totally in the spirit of Little House books, if Laura was magically dyslexic, and and interested in natural history.
And there were mammoths and steam dragons and medusa lizards. Jun 13, Lilian Deforest rated it it was amazing Shelves: adventure , super-powers , has-magic , 5-stars , young-adult-fiction.
I saw the romance coming from the first third of the first book, but it was still well done and satisfying. Sep 20, Zainab rated it it was ok. TL;DR: This book is written by a white lady. What more can I expect? The main character is an initially downtrodden white girl. Susan B. Anthony hating Black people but wanting white women to have the power to vote. And then other white women lauding her as an amazing suffragette for years, while there are some muted voices of people of color trying to point out that she was a virulent racist in the backgrou TL;DR: This book is written by a white lady.
And then other white women lauding her as an amazing suffragette for years, while there are some muted voices of people of color trying to point out that she was a virulent racist in the background. Ya get me? I have so many thoughts about this series. If you are familiar with Patricia C. It was vague enough to bore me I skimmed a bit… Eff is long-winded, but it makes sense for the book is told in first-person and she is very close-mouthed around others so all her thoughts get told to us , and I never felt the world was truly fleshed out.
I know I just said Eff is long winded, but I particularly liked the scenes where she was figuring out a puzzle to do with her identity, her magic, the spells in her talisman, etc. Other than that, she was pretty ordinary for the seventh-daughter of a seventh-son and twin-sister of a seventh-son and, of course, a thirteenth child yadda yadda , which I suppose might be refreshing in a protagonist to some people.
Same goes for what eventually happens with William whom I loved!!!! Such a good character and a refreshing change from the typical masculinity of all the other men. Now, for the big one: where the heck were the indigenous peoples??? I wish I did this as a buddy read with my friend Amara, because she surely would have good articles to explain and expand on the settler-colonial mindset of this entire series.
So, Wrede is a white lady who chose to write a novel featuring a landscape that she created. In her world, the analog would be Columbia.
I think this is an attempt at the sanitation of history, for her. I was preoccupied with dissecting this decision throughout my entire read, and in fact the whole settler-colonial premise of the book annoyed me as I tried to connect to Eff who was the draw to the novel, for me.
For much of the series, it is inconceivable for human life to exist outside the rigid framework that the Columbian settlers have created. Simple, right? If that was the case, why does Wrede include race at all? The white people in this story have still enslaved Black people. Not that she handled this whole slavery thing any better! That fascinating tidbit is just dropped in, and then largely ignored.
That annoyed me, at first, but it does lead me to another good point. Eff is a white woman. That is made clear many times throughout the novel, like the way non-white characters are described. The looking at things argument references a technique she learned from Aphrikan magic. Eff is this special person who is able to connect all of these magical traditions together and see clearly. Leave it to the privileged to take the world as is. I was preoccupied in every interaction with this knowledge.
How was Wash moving through settlements? Did the white settlers give him trouble, or take his help because they needed it, despite him being a Black man? Did Wash mentoring Eff bring up problems?
Perhaps I have too much faith in the author. Eff spends most of the entire book very self-absorbed, thinking herself the harbinger of doom. The only time these issues could be mentioned are in relation to the Universities, however Eff always couches it in terms of what the universities will teach.
Triskelion University is the only school if I recall correctly that teaches all 3 types of magic styles present in the book. But, again, maybe she is unable to, trapped as she is in the patriarchy. Her character does not seem like it has stopped growing in the last book, though she does get married, which annoyed me.
I have so much more to add… I would say, to the reviewers downplaying the issues with the erasure of Native Peoples from this book: fuck off. The whole fun in including different types of magicians and magic styles is in finding people to identify with. I spent a lot of time while reading trying to figure out if the Hijero-Cathayan people could be Indian so I could orient hah myself within this world.
I could go on and on, but overall, this was a mediocre series that got me thinking about sensitivity readers. I do not envy anyone that has that job. How do you reshape a narrative that is so clearly trapped within the white supremacist hegemony of our USAian society? If you do read it, please discuss it with me before I get about the important parts lol. Sep 27, Amrita Goswami rated it did not like it Shelves: fantasy , ya-fiction , love-triangle-ugh. I waffled between giving this book 1 and 2 stars.
I finally decided to give it a low rating because of my personal grievances and annoyances with this book. Much has been said about the lack of representation in this series, but that wasn't even the biggest issue for me. I'm currently pursuing a PhD and my entire family has had a college education. So I was uncomfortable with Eff's attitude towards higher education.
She seemed to be quietly disdainful of 'book learning'. She was also dismissive o I waffled between giving this book 1 and 2 stars. She was also dismissive of her own talents, and seemed to have unscientific methods, which bothered me. At one point, she neglected to tell her twin Lan and William some important aspect of her magic, which exasperated them and me as well Although this isn't really a shortcoming in the strictest sense, it made it difficult for me to empathize with Eff.
I didn't like Lan's insufferable attitude either, and he ended up being a thoroughly unlikable character.
If anything, there is virtually no real representation of academia in YA fiction, at least, and that irritates me more than no racial diversity. And no, the trigger-happy professor who Eff worked for does not count as accurate representation.
I know that I can be a wet blanket about animal killings but the casual disregard for animal lives also upset me. It wasn't so blatant in the first book and got progressively worse in the sequels. Some reviewers have griped about the lack of romance in this book but I called it from the first book itself. The romance was subtle and I liked it more because it was understated. Not every book has to be a 'kissing book'.
The love triangle was unnecessary but was thankfully resolved and glossed over fairly quickly. The final denouement was unsatisfying in the extreme. Despite my waning interest, I had ploughed on with this book to get some closure. Not only was the magic system never explained beyond a point, there was also zero resolution. It kind of felt like the author had just slapped something together and didn't even bother to think of how the problem of the Great Barrier would be fixed.
The ending just felt very incomplete, unassuaged by the epilogue. All in all, while I enjoyed 'Thirteenth Child', I cannot recommend this book or this series. I might try some other novel by Patricia Wrede though. Apr 07, Thera rated it it was ok. This was a very satisfying finale to Eff's trilogy, and if Patricia Wrede ever wants to write a fourth book she has left herself space to do so.
I read it in one stayed-up-too-late-to-finish-my-book evening and I thoroughly enjoyed myself while I was doing so. I do have some concerns with the world building in this series, and they did nag at me extra hard during this book especially, but the story of Eff growing up an This was a very satisfying finale to Eff's trilogy, and if Patricia Wrede ever wants to write a fourth book she has left herself space to do so. I do have some concerns with the world building in this series, and they did nag at me extra hard during this book especially, but the story of Eff growing up and finding a place in her frontier world was lovely anyway.
This is the story of Eff's early 20s, as a young woman with a job, home responsibilities and a couple of suitors but it's still entirely suitable for children. There's one passage where Eff's elder sisters embarrass her beyond belief by bringing up the issue of birth control since view spoiler [ she's going to be on an expedition with few women and lots of men, and the fact that her sister Rennie's eldest child was born 7 months after Rennie's wedding is mentioned too.
Rennie's situation is a very good argument for birth control! Wrede does an excellent job of bringing the frontier mores of Eff's world to life and I really felt for her struggles with her domineering sisters who seem disappointed in their own lives and who don't see why she should be excused her share of the household work just because she has a job as a research assistant. Eventually Eff view spoiler [ gets to go off on an exciting expedition to the far west, an expedition that may very well not survive since no one has ever traveled as far into the west as they will.
It's all very satisfying. What isn't entirely satisfying is Wrede's vision of the world she has built. In short, she's written the American West without any Native Americans in it. Having a place richly capable of sustaining life that doesn't have any humans living in it goes totally against everything we know about of species. Homo Sapiens are an amazingly resilient, adaptive, aggressive and downright sneaky species and we get everywhere, and all evidence suggests that we have been doing this for many tens of thousands of years.
The idea that there aren't any people beyond a few recent settlers living outside the Great Barrier Spell is just absurd. Yes it's dangerous out there but that never stopped us anywhere else in the world and even in this book Wrede admits that humanity is the most dangerous species in the west. All through the book I kept hoping that they'd find a few petroglyphs or something to indicate previous human inhabitants of the plains view spoiler [ though I would totally understand why any such peoples would have moved away from the expedition's path in recent decades as the Great Barrier Spell played havoc with their environment, increasing the magical load along the Grand Bow River hide spoiler ].
I can understand that maybe Wrede didn't want to extensively dwell on the Native American side of the western frontier in her story, but if so, why not just relegate it to a few sentences the way she treats slavery which is part of her world but not the focus of her story?
Writing Native Americans out of the story entirely is massively problematic because in our world that settlement was only made possible by their genocide so to turn around and write a charming frontier tale of a frontier where they simply don't exist is like rubbing a whole salt mine in the wound.
The fact that the Chinese OK, the Cathay are honored and extremely rare guests in Wrede's 19th Century Columbia is also a bit unexamined, but I can see it sitting a bit better as Eff explains at one point that the gold rush is just starting so presumably the extreme anti-Chinese racism that followed hasn't really got started up yet?
So yes, the world building is a bit of a mess and he series would have been better if it was sorted out a bit but I've still given the book five stars, though I probably wouldn't have if it had been written by an unknown author rather than the great Patricia Wrede.
She's given three generations of my family a lot of pleasure over the years, so I'll give her the benefit of the doubt. There is an awful lot to love in this book. I just wish the world was more coherent. Mar 07, Ashley rated it it was amazing. Loved it. May 18, Katie rated it really liked it. This book is incredible! Eff has mixed feelings about many of the people she knows. She has the support and help of older, more experienced people. Her breakthroughs are often not enough without their help and knowledge.
He doesn't achieve his dream of success, but Eff goes beyond anything she thought possible for herself. This book shows that power and natural ability are not all that you need to do great things. I felt that the book was true to life in so many ways. I was, however, disappointed in some of the repetitiveness of details from previous books and there was at least one inconsistency at one point, it said that Roger hadn't been west of the Mammoth river which was untrue, since he'd gone with the group that took the menagerie's mammoth to West Landing.
Aug 08, John rated it liked it Shelves: children-ya , sf-fantasy. Eff joins an expedition trying to reach the Rockies, and along with discovering even more kinds of deadly magical creatures deepens her own magical abilities while participating in a massive collective spell to head off a disaster that is brewing for all of her family and the settlers back home.
None of this even begins until halfway through the book, though, and while I do enjoy Wrede's leisurely, amiable style of story spinning the chapter after chapter of mundane activities and explication be Eff joins an expedition trying to reach the Rockies, and along with discovering even more kinds of deadly magical creatures deepens her own magical abilities while participating in a massive collective spell to head off a disaster that is brewing for all of her family and the settlers back home.
None of this even begins until halfway through the book, though, and while I do enjoy Wrede's leisurely, amiable style of story spinning the chapter after chapter of mundane activities and explication became pretty tedious.
I think that might be because while the characters here are inventively imagined they're not quite up to the cast in her Enchanted Forest series OK for the previous two books but sort of same old, same old in this third one.
Possibly in recognition of that, Wrede ends this in a way that could make it the final volume. This series has been criticized for positing a New World with no human residents until the European settlers arrived. On the one hand, I see how that could be construed as a sort of authorial genocidebut on the other, the premise is really essential to the world she builds.
She does have the right to do it, it being her created world after all, but it still leaves me a little disturbed. Jan 20, MB What she read rated it it was ok Shelves: read-in , fantasy-urban-fantasy-paranormals , young-adult-or-new-adult.
Nice world-building, very dry magic system with too much academical and boring pontificating. Heroine was competent but sure didn't toot her own horn. Eff is very different than the usual special snowflake fantasy heroine, so unassuming and almost too much of a doormat even though she always comes through and manages to save the day.
I guess that's more historically accurate, but for me as a modern reader it is frustrating. Eff is in the background too much for a main character. Compa 2. Compared to in Little Women, where Jo is always the star. I don't feel that with Eff--she is so unassuming and colorless. Things just kind of happen to her and she goes with it. Wasn't the big magical crisis and it's solution very similar to the one in Book 2???
Or is that just me? And the romance? Almost non-existent. Very unsatisfying and series ended with a fizzle. This is a good series and could have been 4 star for me if Eff was a stronger character and less of a colorless cipher. At this point, there's been a lot of discussion about the lack of Native Americans in this alternate universe--my own personal view is that it's a missed opportunity, a pulled punch, but it's not inherently racist to posit a world in which humans never crossed the land bridge from Siberia to Alaska, any more that it would be to posit a world where Columbus never said, or the Ice Age never lifted.
They are all hinge point in history, and writers love to play with them. That said, even as someone who has privilege, I can see how this particular authorial choice might be viewed as a damaging erasure, in a way that changing Columbus's journeys wouldn't, particularly in a context where there's lots of marginalization going on already.
Dec 15, Fee rated it it was ok. I really enjoyed everything in this series, but the one thing that has stuck with me since finishing is the question of what wasn't included. From the get go I found myself waiting with anticipation for Wrede's worldbuilding to introduce First Nations peoples. Given that the alternate history puts such a delightful little twist on the historical relationships between world powers during the American westward expansion, I couldn't wait to see how Wrede would build out the relationship between set I really enjoyed everything in this series, but the one thing that has stuck with me since finishing is the question of what wasn't included.
Given that the alternate history puts such a delightful little twist on the historical relationships between world powers during the American westward expansion, I couldn't wait to see how Wrede would build out the relationship between settlers and the indigenous people they encountered.
But this series got through three very enjoyable books' worth of westward exploration of North America without even mentioning indigenous people, their culture, or their relationship to the land that was being settled. The far west is instead presented as an entirely vacant landscape awaiting "discovery", which left me feeling unsettled. Again, I enjoyed the story for what it was, but I can't feel comfortable with an alternate history of America that erases indigenous people from the settlement narrative.
Readers also enjoyed. Young Adult. About Patricia C. Patricia C. Patricia Collins Wrede was born in Chicago, Illinois and is the eldest of five children. She started writing in seventh grade. She attended Carleton College in Minnesota, where she majored in Biology and managed to avoid taking any English courses at all.
She began work on her first novel, Shadow Magic, just after graduating from college in She finished it five years later and started her se Patricia Collins Wrede was born in Chicago, Illinois and is the eldest of five children. She finished it five years later and started her second book at once, having become permanently hooked on writing by this time. Patricia received her M. She worked for several years as a financial analyst and accountant, first with the Minnesota Hospital Association, then with B.
Dalton Booksellers, and finally at the Dayton Hudson Corporation headquarters. Patricia finished her first novel in late In April of , Patricia's first novel sold to Ace Books. In , shortly before the publication of her fifth book, she left the world of the gainfully employed to try winging it on her own.
Her interests include sewing, embroidery, desultory attempts at gardening, chocolate, not mowing the lawn, High Tea, and, of course, reading. She is a vegetarian, and currently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her cat Karma. She has no children. Other books in the series. Frontier Magic 3 books. Books by Patricia C. Related Articles. Some of the techniques listed in The Far West may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.
DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url. If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed. Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to fantasy, young adult lovers.
Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Wrede Submitted by: Jane Kivik. Read Online Download. Wrede Original Title: The Far West Book Format: ebook Number Of Pages: pages First Published in: August 1st Latest Edition: October 1st Series: Frontier Magic 3 category: fantasy, young adult, fantasy, magic, historical, historical fiction, science fiction, alternate history, adventure, fiction, historical, young adult, young adult fantasy, science fiction, steampunk Formats: ePUB Android , audible mp3, audiobook and kindle.
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