Garion’s parents died when he was very young (the story of their death is told near the end of the book) and he’s being raised by his Aunt Pol. The protagonist is Garion, a 14-ish year old boy living on a farm. The heroes are all very much white people, and mostly men. My guess for the minimum age for a good audience here would be middle schoolers or precocious fifth graders. There’s just not enough action in Pawn of Prophesy to drag along someone looking for swashbuckling adventure every step of the way. There’s a lot of traveling and talking while world-building and intrigue is wonderful for certain readers, it’s not often up the alley of the average 10 year old. The plot is simple enough, but it seems like the execution of it is likely to be a bit beyond the typical tween. This isn’t a book explicitly aimed at middle grade readers. SPOILER ALERT: Things you might want to know before suggesting this to your kid Target Audience Pawn of Prophesy is of a digestible length (my copy is a 260 page Del Rey paperback from the early 1990s), rather than one of those 600 page tomes that so many fantasy novelists seem to want to write.īut upon a more mature reread, it has its issues. Eddings’s prose is solid and efficient without being dull. It’s a terrific (if not especially original) setting, richly detailed without bludgeoning the reader with useless triviality. I enjoyed my reread of Pawn of Prophesy quite a lot. So, yes, okay, it’s derivative, but it’s also a sweeping, epic hero’s journey that many of us loved every page of when we read it 20 years ago. It is Nope Not At All Just Like The Lord Of The Rings No Sir. Pawn of Prophecy kicks off David Eddings’s Belgariad series, which chronicles the adventures of the ancient sorcerers Belgarath and Polgara, with their young companion Garion, in a quest to save the world from the evil god Torak.

Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings