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The Wizard's Shadow
Crocken the peddler had made a bad bargain.
For a bag of gold and a chance to keep breathing, Crocken had grudgingly agreed to conduct the shadow-remnant of a murdered wizard to the distant kingdom of Armyn.
Crocken kept his end of the deal. Trailed at every step by the chill, disapproving wraith, he braved wilderness, floods, and savage beasts. But when he finally won through to the Armyn fortress of Axe-Edge, he found his term of servitude extended at his intangible master's whim. For at Axe-Edge, Crocken was mistaken for a hero.
Doors opened to a hero that would have slammed in any ordinary peddler's face. And behind one of those doors waited the wizard's murderer . . .
For a bag of gold and a chance to keep breathing, Crocken had grudgingly agreed to conduct the shadow-remnant of a murdered wizard to the distant kingdom of Armyn.
Crocken kept his end of the deal. Trailed at every step by the chill, disapproving wraith, he braved wilderness, floods, and savage beasts. But when he finally won through to the Armyn fortress of Axe-Edge, he found his term of servitude extended at his intangible master's whim. For at Axe-Edge, Crocken was mistaken for a hero.
Doors opened to a hero that would have slammed in any ordinary peddler's face. And behind one of those doors waited the wizard's murderer . . .
277 pages, Paperback
First published July 5, 1993
About the author
Susan Dexter
18 books63 followersSusan Dexter’s favorite subject for her books is fantasy and throughout her life has worked as a librarian, teacher, and writer.
Susan received her first award, the Merit Award, in 1976 from the Lawrence County Open Arts Show. She also received the Distinguished Award from them in 1982 and 1983. The Wizard’s Shadow was listed among the “Books for the Teen Age” in 1993 by the New York Public Library.
She now lives in New Castle, Pennsylvania in the vintage house that her book sales enabled her to buy and restore.
Susan received her first award, the Merit Award, in 1976 from the Lawrence County Open Arts Show. She also received the Distinguished Award from them in 1982 and 1983. The Wizard’s Shadow was listed among the “Books for the Teen Age” in 1993 by the New York Public Library.
She now lives in New Castle, Pennsylvania in the vintage house that her book sales enabled her to buy and restore.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 20, 2015
This was the first Susan Dexter I read in my reread, and it was my first clue that it had been longer than I thought since I read these books - too long. I might have reread them, but it would have to have been at least ten years, I think, for all of them. Ten years and hundreds of books later, I've had plenty of time to forget almost everything: perfect.
I've started with The Wizard's Shadow, which starts with a murder, or an execution. The impression is of something dark, something hunted, being pinned down and put, terribly, to death - very effective writing. It doesn't entirely die, though - a shadow takes shelter unter a rock, and settles to wait.
It has a long wait on the seldom-traveled path, until Crocken the peddlar comes along. The poor bugger has had a terrible time of it, with a string of bad luck, insult to injury, that has sent him off on a trading journey farther than he's ever gone before to recoup losses he's suffered. The ill luck hits him again, in the form of his bad-tempered mule and a fall ... which along with knocking him out dislodges a certain rock along the trail ... And when Crocken comes around he is no longer alone. His shadow is gone and has been replaced with a new one, one which, hard as it is to accept even in a world in which magic is common, can speak to him. It makes him a classic offer which cannot be refused: divert his path to the kingdom of Armyn, with the shadow trailing along behind, and he will be paid handsomely. If not ...
Crocken knows it to be a bad bargain - the way is difficult, and long, and very much not where he was headed - but there isn't much else he can do. He obeys, and the arduous journey is only the beginning of a complicated situation he feels completely unequipped for: a morass of motive and suspicion and very dark magic in the castle, a foreign bride for the young to-be-crowned king, and the mystery of what - who - the shadow is, or was, and what exactly it wants.
I loved it. Wizard's Shadow, and every other book I have by Susan Dexter, is exactly what I love best in a book: intelligent, funny, wonderful characters in a beautifully created setting involved in fascinating situations. I made guesses about what was going on - guessed wrong - didn't care, because I was enjoying the book too much. The story did not end up as I'd feared, with the typical everyone-neatly-paired-off trope, and I was glad. I hadn't planned to move on to the Tristan books, but after Shadow I didn't have any more of a choice than poor old Crocken: I had to keep going with Susan Dexter's work. I only wish there was more. ~Stewartry
I've started with The Wizard's Shadow, which starts with a murder, or an execution. The impression is of something dark, something hunted, being pinned down and put, terribly, to death - very effective writing. It doesn't entirely die, though - a shadow takes shelter unter a rock, and settles to wait.
It has a long wait on the seldom-traveled path, until Crocken the peddlar comes along. The poor bugger has had a terrible time of it, with a string of bad luck, insult to injury, that has sent him off on a trading journey farther than he's ever gone before to recoup losses he's suffered. The ill luck hits him again, in the form of his bad-tempered mule and a fall ... which along with knocking him out dislodges a certain rock along the trail ... And when Crocken comes around he is no longer alone. His shadow is gone and has been replaced with a new one, one which, hard as it is to accept even in a world in which magic is common, can speak to him. It makes him a classic offer which cannot be refused: divert his path to the kingdom of Armyn, with the shadow trailing along behind, and he will be paid handsomely. If not ...
Crocken knows it to be a bad bargain - the way is difficult, and long, and very much not where he was headed - but there isn't much else he can do. He obeys, and the arduous journey is only the beginning of a complicated situation he feels completely unequipped for: a morass of motive and suspicion and very dark magic in the castle, a foreign bride for the young to-be-crowned king, and the mystery of what - who - the shadow is, or was, and what exactly it wants.
I loved it. Wizard's Shadow, and every other book I have by Susan Dexter, is exactly what I love best in a book: intelligent, funny, wonderful characters in a beautifully created setting involved in fascinating situations. I made guesses about what was going on - guessed wrong - didn't care, because I was enjoying the book too much. The story did not end up as I'd feared, with the typical everyone-neatly-paired-off trope, and I was glad. I hadn't planned to move on to the Tristan books, but after Shadow I didn't have any more of a choice than poor old Crocken: I had to keep going with Susan Dexter's work. I only wish there was more. ~Stewartry
March 11, 2018
The Wizard’s Shadow by Susan Dexter is, both at its best and at its core, a story about a fantastical, medieval odd-couple. Crocken, our down-on-his-luck protagonist, makes a deal with the shadow of a slain wizard. In exchange for letting this wizard’s shadow replace his natural one—and for helping transport it to the royal city of Axe-Edge for some nefarious purpose—Crocken makes a few coins and isn’t murdered by said shadow.
Dexter sets this up beautifully. The first chapter covers the death of the wizard, and due to the mythology of this world, this death is slow and torturous. As someone with a weak stomach and an over-active imagination, such a topic would normally bother me, and yet it didn't. Dexter pulled no punches, and the scene is realistically dark, yet it is just poetic and sparse enough to prevent my mind from lingering on the worst of it.
I was impressed, which was good, because for the next hundred pages or so, my interest waned. Interactions between Crocken and his shadow were fascinating, but while en-route to Axe-Edge, there was little reason for them to talk. Worse, Dexter’s prose can be needlessly dense or obtuse.
For example, at one point, “shadows danced gavottes before Crocken’s eyes.”
Obviously “shadows danced before Crocken’s eyes” is easy enough to parse, but what the hell is a gavotte? At the time, I couldn’t be bothered to look it up.
Today, Google tells me that the (a?) gavotte is a medium-paced French dance popular in the 18th century. Aside from the fact that this is a fantastical world without the country of France, and this particular dance is oddly niche, why even name the type of dance the shadows performed? She may as well have written that “shadows danced the macarena before Crocken’s eyes.”
Obviously, I could have skipped over the word gavotte and understood what had happened. So why the snark? Well, it was sandwiched between sentences like:
"They were fair of face and prettily dressed, and betimes one or another was permitted to play upon a lute for him, in hope that sweet music would speed his convalescence."
My eyes still blurry from sleep, and my brain yet without caffeine, it took me damn-near all of my ten-minute commute to make it through that sentence. I’m not expecting authors to dumb down their books for my early-morning brain, but I have way too many examples of needlessly complex sentences using fifty-cent words. One or the other, please. I can’t handle both.
Other things niggled at me as well. All the women we see or hear of in the first 80 pages or so are one-dimensionally, almost pointlessly, cruel and/or stupid. The point-of-view of the story is a little too flexible. At one point, there’s a four-page info dump that I procrastinated finishing for days. Minor physical injuries are milked for weeks for dramatic effect. The storytelling goes out of its way to rationalize the completely rational behavior of its characters.
There are more things to pick at, but you get my point. And yet I kept reading. I liked the strange and growing relationship between Crocken and his shadow. I was curious about the shadow’s quest. And when a dignitary quipped at Crocken that his shadow behaved strangely, I was hooked. What did this dignitary know, and how did she know it?
My favorite part of The Wizard’s Shadow is Crocken’s evolving relationships with his shadow and the denizens of the royal city of Axe-Edge. I was especially delighted and enthralled with his mortal friendships. They were vulnerable, awkward, and authentic. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book where a man tried to befriend another man, and then struggled with how to go about doing that.
I was rooting for them to bro-out like how I might root for two characters to fall in love. I was nervous about everything going on around them that might get between them and thrilled with every smile, every friendly gesture.
There is, sadly, a romantic element shoe-horned in at the end, and there are two plots—one emotional, one delightfully bizarre—going on behind the scenes, but my big takeaway from the novel is Crocken and his relationships.
The Wizard’s Shadow never became the perfect book, but it did remind me that a book doesn’t have to be perfect to be worth reading. I'm glad I stumbled across it.
[I read old fantasy and sci-fi novels written by women authors in search of forgotten gems. See more at forfemfan.com]
Dexter sets this up beautifully. The first chapter covers the death of the wizard, and due to the mythology of this world, this death is slow and torturous. As someone with a weak stomach and an over-active imagination, such a topic would normally bother me, and yet it didn't. Dexter pulled no punches, and the scene is realistically dark, yet it is just poetic and sparse enough to prevent my mind from lingering on the worst of it.
I was impressed, which was good, because for the next hundred pages or so, my interest waned. Interactions between Crocken and his shadow were fascinating, but while en-route to Axe-Edge, there was little reason for them to talk. Worse, Dexter’s prose can be needlessly dense or obtuse.
For example, at one point, “shadows danced gavottes before Crocken’s eyes.”
Obviously “shadows danced before Crocken’s eyes” is easy enough to parse, but what the hell is a gavotte? At the time, I couldn’t be bothered to look it up.
Today, Google tells me that the (a?) gavotte is a medium-paced French dance popular in the 18th century. Aside from the fact that this is a fantastical world without the country of France, and this particular dance is oddly niche, why even name the type of dance the shadows performed? She may as well have written that “shadows danced the macarena before Crocken’s eyes.”
Obviously, I could have skipped over the word gavotte and understood what had happened. So why the snark? Well, it was sandwiched between sentences like:
"They were fair of face and prettily dressed, and betimes one or another was permitted to play upon a lute for him, in hope that sweet music would speed his convalescence."
My eyes still blurry from sleep, and my brain yet without caffeine, it took me damn-near all of my ten-minute commute to make it through that sentence. I’m not expecting authors to dumb down their books for my early-morning brain, but I have way too many examples of needlessly complex sentences using fifty-cent words. One or the other, please. I can’t handle both.
Other things niggled at me as well. All the women we see or hear of in the first 80 pages or so are one-dimensionally, almost pointlessly, cruel and/or stupid. The point-of-view of the story is a little too flexible. At one point, there’s a four-page info dump that I procrastinated finishing for days. Minor physical injuries are milked for weeks for dramatic effect. The storytelling goes out of its way to rationalize the completely rational behavior of its characters.
There are more things to pick at, but you get my point. And yet I kept reading. I liked the strange and growing relationship between Crocken and his shadow. I was curious about the shadow’s quest. And when a dignitary quipped at Crocken that his shadow behaved strangely, I was hooked. What did this dignitary know, and how did she know it?
My favorite part of The Wizard’s Shadow is Crocken’s evolving relationships with his shadow and the denizens of the royal city of Axe-Edge. I was especially delighted and enthralled with his mortal friendships. They were vulnerable, awkward, and authentic. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book where a man tried to befriend another man, and then struggled with how to go about doing that.
I was rooting for them to bro-out like how I might root for two characters to fall in love. I was nervous about everything going on around them that might get between them and thrilled with every smile, every friendly gesture.
There is, sadly, a romantic element shoe-horned in at the end, and there are two plots—one emotional, one delightfully bizarre—going on behind the scenes, but my big takeaway from the novel is Crocken and his relationships.
The Wizard’s Shadow never became the perfect book, but it did remind me that a book doesn’t have to be perfect to be worth reading. I'm glad I stumbled across it.
[I read old fantasy and sci-fi novels written by women authors in search of forgotten gems. See more at forfemfan.com]
March 26, 2019
A stand-alone. The only repeating elements from earlier stories are geographical.
Crocken, a peddler, is setting out in a fury rather earlier having been jilted. This takes him to rather wild territory where, after an awkward fall, he meets up with a shadow. It makes a deal with him, and the next morning, when he's inclined to write it off as imaginary, it sets out to enforce it.
Ensues a hard trek over a swollen river, during which Crocken loses his pony and most of his goods, and into the kingdom of Armyn and its borderlands. The shadow then takes advantage of a royal hunt, a princess who went astray, and a fierce wild boar to inveigle Crocken into the royal court. (Surely a man who took on a wild boar with nothing but his knife was a royal, or at least a noble! What commoner would be so courageous?)
There, and only there, does Crocken begin to disentangle who the shadow is, what the shadow wishes to do, and what the court itself is like. There is the queen mother, the as yet uncrowned prince, his six sisters (all older), and his protector and uncle Rhisiart -- the shadow insists that Rhisiart betrayed him -- and also the prince's foreign betrothed, and her sole servant Mistress Ivy. (The princess did not want to bring too many foreigners to the court.) Not to mention dreams of things long past. . . .
It involves many dreams of things past and prophetic ones as well, dreamed by Mistress Ivy. A horse that Rhisiart's half-brother urged him to buy, and Rhisiart's desperate desire to never fail his dead brother again. An attempt to use a shirt to work magic. An ambush where a shadow pushes a man from a horse. The death of an insignificant maid-servant. And much more.
Crocken, a peddler, is setting out in a fury rather earlier having been jilted. This takes him to rather wild territory where, after an awkward fall, he meets up with a shadow. It makes a deal with him, and the next morning, when he's inclined to write it off as imaginary, it sets out to enforce it.
Ensues a hard trek over a swollen river, during which Crocken loses his pony and most of his goods, and into the kingdom of Armyn and its borderlands. The shadow then takes advantage of a royal hunt, a princess who went astray, and a fierce wild boar to inveigle Crocken into the royal court. (Surely a man who took on a wild boar with nothing but his knife was a royal, or at least a noble! What commoner would be so courageous?)
There, and only there, does Crocken begin to disentangle who the shadow is, what the shadow wishes to do, and what the court itself is like. There is the queen mother, the as yet uncrowned prince, his six sisters (all older), and his protector and uncle Rhisiart -- the shadow insists that Rhisiart betrayed him -- and also the prince's foreign betrothed, and her sole servant Mistress Ivy. (The princess did not want to bring too many foreigners to the court.) Not to mention dreams of things long past. . . .
It involves many dreams of things past and prophetic ones as well, dreamed by Mistress Ivy. A horse that Rhisiart's half-brother urged him to buy, and Rhisiart's desperate desire to never fail his dead brother again. An attempt to use a shirt to work magic. An ambush where a shadow pushes a man from a horse. The death of an insignificant maid-servant. And much more.
May 14, 2019
Crocken the peddler has a string of bad luck, culminating in his being bound to a shadow-wizard, the remnants of a dead man bent on revenge. I found it hard to like Crocken, as he's rather passive as the shadow continually changes their bargain and abuses him. There's not many choices available to him. A remarkable amount of lying happens, and plotting and treason, and the end isn't very conclusive.
January 21, 2017
“The Wizard’s Shadow” gets off to a decent start before fading in the second half. Its strongest point is a clever and at least somewhat novel idea: that a murdered wizard might survive in the form of his shadow, and that said shadow might then attach itself to another person. Dexter has some fun with this idea: the shadow has to practice imitating the movements of its new host, during the day he has to accompany him everywhere, etc. Also, she creates a nice odd-couple dynamic between the rather aristocratic shadow and his plebeian host, a traveling peddler. However, once they arrive in Axe-Edge, where the shadow has some unfinished business, the momentum created by the early scenes diminishes. The shadow tends to recede into, well, the shadows, while the focus shifts to Crocken, the peddler, who, though more mercantile than your average hero, is otherwise pretty run-of-the-mill. Still, if the remainder of the book doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its beginning, it’s still not bad: Dexter competently executes some court intrigue and handles a series of flashback sequences reasonably well. And Mistress Ivy, who we meet at the castle and fills much of the space left by the shadow’s reduced role, is sympathetic and fairly well written (although her big reveal is telegraphed well ahead of time), and her and Crocken’s relationship is only slightly implausible. Overall, the book is a decent effort, but I think it would’ve been better if its most interesting idea had been better utilized.
Shelved as 'xx-dnf-skim-reference'
February 22, 2021The beginning, the premise, showed promise, so I persevered despite the fact that I found the book soporific. Then we got to the court intrigue, which I despise reading about, so, I'm moving on.
dnf Feb. 2021
dnf Feb. 2021
December 18, 2020
2.5 stars, Metaphorosis Reviews
Summary
An itinerant peddler is partially possessed by the shadow of a dead and vengeful mage.
Review
The only joy of culling a library is the chance to go back through all the books and pick out the ones you don’t remember well. If I re-read all of those, I’d never get this slow-moving project done, but I did pick a few.
The Wizard’s Shadow is one from the category – Don’t Remember At All. And there’s some reason for that, unfortunately. It’s a better tale than I remembered, though few of the details rang any bells. It’s got a credible, somewhat unusual character at the core – a peddler driven by a dead mage’s shadow. But it never troubles to delve very deeply into its characters, or its hero’s motivations and interactions, which means that most of his interesting credibility goes by the wayside in a plot that’s more sketched than implemented. Dexter seems more interested in the economics and the setting than in the human interactions, and it’s a shame, because there’s a good deal of potential here. The result is a pleasant but forgettable novel. It’s the kind of book that would be a good world-expansion side book. It’s possible that it was intended as such, since the book suggests Dexter also has a trilogy or two (and ISFDB says they’re in the same world). Unfortunately, reading this wasn’t enough to draw me on to those. As a standalone, the book is nice, but a bit …[shrug]. I wish Dexter had done more to develop it.
The central mystery – the shadow of the mage – is more impulse than thread, and is more dropped than resolved at the end, though not in a really frustrating way. That same laxity applies to some extent to the relationships, where, after a feint at honest emotion, Dexter falls back to tested tropes and formula.
Summary
An itinerant peddler is partially possessed by the shadow of a dead and vengeful mage.
Review
The only joy of culling a library is the chance to go back through all the books and pick out the ones you don’t remember well. If I re-read all of those, I’d never get this slow-moving project done, but I did pick a few.
The Wizard’s Shadow is one from the category – Don’t Remember At All. And there’s some reason for that, unfortunately. It’s a better tale than I remembered, though few of the details rang any bells. It’s got a credible, somewhat unusual character at the core – a peddler driven by a dead mage’s shadow. But it never troubles to delve very deeply into its characters, or its hero’s motivations and interactions, which means that most of his interesting credibility goes by the wayside in a plot that’s more sketched than implemented. Dexter seems more interested in the economics and the setting than in the human interactions, and it’s a shame, because there’s a good deal of potential here. The result is a pleasant but forgettable novel. It’s the kind of book that would be a good world-expansion side book. It’s possible that it was intended as such, since the book suggests Dexter also has a trilogy or two (and ISFDB says they’re in the same world). Unfortunately, reading this wasn’t enough to draw me on to those. As a standalone, the book is nice, but a bit …[shrug]. I wish Dexter had done more to develop it.
The central mystery – the shadow of the mage – is more impulse than thread, and is more dropped than resolved at the end, though not in a really frustrating way. That same laxity applies to some extent to the relationships, where, after a feint at honest emotion, Dexter falls back to tested tropes and formula.
May 6, 2010
Interesting tale of how a wizard 's incorporeal shadow takes his vengeance for his corporeal existence's death.
I like Dexter's books. Good characters. Good plots. Typically witty and this was no exception
I like Dexter's books. Good characters. Good plots. Typically witty and this was no exception
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews