I am doing the re-read *approximately* in the order of the events in the books. I finished the first four books up to Sethanon before reading this add-on series, even though this takes place during Magician.

This one was fun, not quite up to the others, but I am determined to give all of them 5 stars on the re-read, damn the analytics. ( )

A great little adventure for Jimmy. You need to start reading this from the moment that Arutha gives Jimmy his sword on the docks at Krondor as Arutha is making his escape. ( )

It is always good to have more material about one of the favorite characters of the Riftwar, Jimmy the Hand. I also liked the collaboration of Feist and Stirling, though it was fairly obvious which parts were written by whom. Good stuff. ( )

Solid enough.

I mean, this is the young Jimmy right after he helps out Arutha back in the first books. By all rights, it ought to be a simple cashing in on one of the best characters in Feistland, and for the most part, it is.

The novel reads episodic and pits Jimmy against his worst enemy -- himself -- as he uses his bump of trouble to uncover all kinds of bad situations where he must insert his catlike body. Sound good? It is, assuming you like teenaged thieves getting into trouble with women... or rather, because of women.

But all told? It's just solid enough. Jimmy's other exploits are generally much, much more epic. ( )

Jimmy the Hand is the third and final book in the Legends of the Riftwar subseries that takes place during Feist’s original Magician novel. This one is co-written with S. M. Stirling. The story is set shortly after Jimmy and Arutha’s first encounter during Magician, starting right around the part where Arutha and Anita are escaping Krondor by boat and Arutha tosses Jimmy his rapier.

I liked this one much better than the last two books! Jimmy is one of my favorite characters, so it’s hardly surprising that I enjoyed a story featuring him, but I also really liked some of the other characters created for the story and I enjoyed the story itself. It was far more interesting to me than either of the previous two books and it held my attention from beginning to end.

There are some pieces that seemed a bit too coincidental and/or too much of a stretch. These things might have been plausible within the context of the story, but they nevertheless stretched my belief a hair past the breaking point. Elaine’s body is in a room that’s trapped in a pocket of slowed-down time so that she won’t die while her husband and the magician try to find a way to heal her. Yet somehow her mind manages to escape her body and observe things going on in the castle in real-time and she can communicate with the children in real-time. Ok, maaaaybe if she’s somehow projecting her consciousness outside her body and far enough away to escape the time trap it might make sense that she can do these things, but it seems like it would take time for her to accomplish that and the time spent while her consciousness is still within the time trap would translate to a lot of time passing outside of it meanwhile. Yet she seems to pop in and out frequently, sometimes just a few minutes later, to observe and try to assist the children. We were also told that she was losing consciousness for days or even weeks at a time, and yet she conveniently manages to regain it frequently for the sake of the story. Also, everybody in the surrounding area believes Elaine is dead, and yet her husband brought in healers over a period of time to try to help her before he gave up and turned to dark magic, so surely word would have gotten out that she was still alive.

My complaints were pretty minor things though, and I enjoyed the story overall. I don’t really think this subseries added anything critical to the main series, so one could skip it without missing out on anything important if it doesn’t sound appealing. Each book stands completely separate from the others in the subseries, so one could also just pick and choose the ones that sound interesting. I liked the first book reasonably well after its slow start, and I liked this one quite a lot, but I wouldn’t have minded missing the second one. ( )