Tag: fantasy books

#REVIEW: Advocate, by Daniel M. Ford

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The standard disclaimers apply: Dan and I are Internet Mutuals, the origin of which is lost to time but almost certainly involves Twitter somehow. I spend a fair amount of time hanging out in his Discord server, which is, in fact, the only Discord server I spend any time in. And while I reviewed The Warden, the first book in this series, I somehow did not review Necrobane, the second book. My vague recollection is that I had kind of complicated feelings about it and the review just kind of got away from me; I didn’t dislike it, although I do have to talk about it in order to talk about Advocate.

Which, by the way, I’m gonna screw this up: the name of the book is Advocate, not The Advocate. I keep wanting to put that The in there.

So let’s rip the Band-aid off here: viewed on its own, I really enjoyed Advocate, for much the same reasons I enjoyed Warden, and the rest of Dan’s work. Aelis is a fabulous asshole, of a type I enjoy reading about, and a couple of the new characters, particularly an alcoholic gnome named Mihil and a fellow Warden (and ex-girlfriend) of Aelis’ named Miralla, are also a lot of fun. That’s Miralla in the back on the cover, although the elf on the right is not Mihil, even though he should be.

(I get why he isn’t; that’s Amadin, another Warden, and he’s a fairly important character, but I suspect the real reason Mihil isn’t on the cover is that including a gnome in the composition would make placing the cover text tricky.)

The bulk of Advocate unfolds like a mystery, although we know who committed the crime from the first pages of the book, and Aelis’ job is less to prove her former mentor innocent than to convince the court that no crime was committed in the first place. The story is satisfyingly twisty-turny and Aelis gets plenty of time to show off her two best character traits: her utter confidence in her own ability to outwit literally anyone and her tendency to make a snap decision, get in over her head, and then somehow come out on top anyway. There’s lots of swordplay and quite a bit more actual necromancy than what we saw in the last couple of books.

Advocate‘s biggest problem is that, while the cover calls it “Book Three of the Warden Series,” it is, for now at least, the final book of the Warden series, and it’s structured much more like Book Three of Six than Book Three of Three. But let’s back up a little bit and talk about Warden and Necrobane.

Warden ended with Aelis screwing up in a fairly spectacular way, potentially unleashing a continent-wide zombie plague. I was expecting the rest of the series to be focused on that not-minor problem, and the book went an entirely different way than I expected, dealing with what I thought was going to be a two-book problem in about a hundred pages or so and then pivoting into something else. At the end of Necrobane, Aelis’ love interest is magically bound to a particular plot of land in the midst of a wild forest a fair distance away from Lone Pine, and Aelis is unable to figure out how to free her. Then, at the end of the book, she is summoned to the city of Lascenise, a major (and wealthy) metropolitan area, to serve as an Advocate for her old mentor, who has been accused of murder. An Advocate is basically a Warden lawyer; Bardun Jacques has a lawyer but is entitled to a Warden defending him (and investigating his case) as well. He has asked for her specifically. She has no real choice but to go.

This was another left turn, and I was concerned with what it meant; that Book Three would be taking place in an entirely different place and with, importantly, an entirely new cast— Maurenia being magically stuck on a couple acres of land a week or two away, and half-orc werebear Tun being entirely unsuited to life in a city. And, in fact, that’s exactly what happened. The two stories do end up knitting themselves together, but Tun’s presence in the story is minimal and Maurenia’s role is basically to be something else that Aelis has to worry about in addition to the rather significant number of new problems the story is dumping on her head. It’s probably important to point out that Aelis was going to have to head toward civilization anyway, as she was going to need access to libraries to figure out how to release Maurenia, but she’s more or less stuck there until her Advocate duties are discharged. Making things worse, in her last scene with Maurenia before leaving it’s made clear that there’s a time limit on how long she has to break the spell before Maurenia is, effectively, taken over by the forest.

(Side note: Necrobane also features a fight with one of the creepiest monsters I’ve seen on-page. The book contains a tooth golem, which is every bit as awful as you might think, and maybe worse.)

So your appreciation of Advocate is going to be contingent on how much you like Aelis, and how willing you are to lose the supporting cast we’ve grown to like over the last two books. This is what I mean by it being a better “book three of six” than an end to a trilogy; there’s lots of expansion to the worldbuilding and lots of character development for Aelis (we meet her family!) and all of that is cool but if you were really vibing with her and Maurenia’s relationship, or her mentor/mentee relationship with the little girl she’s teaching to read at the end of Necrobane, you’re gonna have a hard time. And this would be much easier to bear if we knew there was Book Four on the way out there, but Tor has really screwed this series over(*) and right now there isn’t one. I decided to star-rate it on its own merits, mostly because no one can stop me, but I can imagine other readers being less happy.

I want more books in this series, in other words, not only because the world is fascinating and I want more but because I think the story and the characters deserve it.

(*) Not my story to tell, unfortunately, but I feel like they owe Dan another trilogy to make up for how they treated this one. Even if I didn’t know him, the simple fact that somehow I have bought five copies of the three books in this trilogy and still don’t have a matching set to put on my shelf would have me deeply pissed.

On The Stormlight Archives

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My wife genuinely suggested to me, half an hour ago, as I was telling her that I had to write this and that I was not looking forward to it, that I just make the entire post a single word:

“Don’t.”

And … well, no. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this series is how close to being remarkable it is. Most of the reviewers certainly seem to think it’s amazing; the lowest-ranked of the main Archives books is at 4.51 on Goodreads, which is hardly a failure.

And in many ways it really is remarkable. I stand by my repeated assertion that The Way of Kings is an amazing fucking book. But unfortunately the series follows what has become a sadly typical trajectory of the fantasy megaseries, that being that each book is worse than the book before it. And much like the best example of this phenomenon, A Song of Ice and Fire, the first book is so good that there’s plenty of room for the books to get worse before they even begin to approach being bad.

So let’s start off with some good stuff. The books are clearly carefully planned out. George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss are never releasing the next books in their series because they have written themselves into corners. I believe completely that Sanderson is going to deliver on books six through ten if he lives long enough, and I may even buy them if only to have them on the shelf. He’s going somewhere with this and he knows what he’s doing. And while I have some serious issues with his worldbuilding– more on that later– there is no doubt that it is both deliberate and meticulous. It’s not easy to write a five-book series in the first place! I certainly couldn’t do it! It’s even harder when each book is over a thousand pages long and all five of them come out in a fifteen-year period of time where you also write and release seven hundred other books.

By all rights, these books should be much, much crappier than they are. It’s amazing that they’re even readable, to be honest.

But about halfway through Oathbringer, a book that I abandoned early the first time I tried to read it, the books took a turn that I wasn’t expecting.

Unfortunately, that turn was directly up Brandon Sanderson’s ass.

The Cosmere has its fans, I am aware of this. I am very very much not one of them. For those of you unaware of the meaning of that term, all (perhaps most? Let’s go with most) of Brandon Sanderson’s books exist in the same universe. During the time where I was reading his work regularly, he hadn’t really revealed this little detail of his work, and any connections between different series either went unnoticed or were dismissed as Easter eggs of no particular real significance.

You can imagine my dismay when the fucking annoying talking sword from Warbreaker, by far my least favorite of Sanderson’s books, showed up in Oathbringer, and you will have to take my word for it that said dismay increased significantly when it became clear that not only was the sword not going away but it was far from the last intrusion his other books were going to make into Stormlight. It was never really explained why the sword was there. It just was. Other characters from his books showed up too, one with a pretty prominent role, others in cameos. Other planets were frequently discussed, and travel between them became a sub-theme. And after a while, every time I encountered a character I didn’t immediately recognize, I had to play this stupid game where I was wondering if it was just a minor character that after thousands and thousands of pages of narrative I simply didn’t remember, or if it was someone from another book and I was supposed to realize something about it.

Again, you may like the Cosmere. More power to you. Enjoy the wikis. It damn near destroyed the books for me.

I nearly started talking about his characters when discussing the positives of the series, and stopped; most of his characters are assassinated over the course of the series. Kaladin is amazing in The Way of Kings; he has the following exchange in Wind and Truth, which is treated like a mic drop:

“How?” Ishar repeated. “What are you?” He gestured toward Szeth.
“Are you… are you his spren? His god?”

“No,” Kaladin said. “I’m his therapist.”

…

Shut up, Brandon Sanderson. Mental illness is a theme of at least three if not four of the books, but it’s handled so, so poorly that I don’t even want to talk about it. Everybody’s fucked up somehow, and it becomes annoying after a while. The final book, one thousand three hundred and twenty-nine pages long, is 70% flashbacks, and the other 30% is mostly self-affirmations.

Which. Yeah. Bloat. I’m not joking about Wind and Truth being 70% flashbacks. Nearly all of the book is presented in a series of visions. What happens in Book Four? At the beginning of the book the bad guys take over a place, and at the end of the book they are driven out of that place again. The actual changes to the status quo over Rhythm of War’s 1200 pages or so could be done and dusted in 250 pages. Whole subplots just never gelled with me at all. Shallan spent two books chasing around something called the … Dustbloods? Ghostbloods! It’s Ghostbloods. They’re from Mistborn, apparently? They’re completely irrelevant to anything, as far as I was able to tell, and the entire subplot could have been cut with no damage. And it takes her away from characters who her interactions with are actually interesting. I don’t think she has a single scene with Jasnah after the third book. It’s fucking ridiculous.

The books are so thoroughly up Brandon Sanderson’s ass that it may be better to stop comparing the series to A Song of Ice and Fire and compare them instead to another megaseries written by an author so famous that he could shit on a napkin and sell a million copies: The Dark Tower.

What I’m saying is that were I to discover that Brandon Sanderson self-inserts into Book Seven, I would not be the least bit surprised.

Gah. I could keep going; I don’t want to. Like I said, I’ll probably buy the rest of the books if only because having half of the series on my shelf will annoy the shit out of me. Will I read them? Okay, I’ll probably read Book Six, because it’ll be interesting to see where he goes with what he’s calling the “second major arc” of the series. I make no promises after that, and I am absolutely not dragging myself through another reread of this monstrosity.

They aren’t terrible. They really genuinely aren’t. But there is six and a half thousand pages of this, and “not terrible” is not good enough motivation to read six and a half thousand pages, and it certainly isn’t enough to get me to recommend them. I won’t stop you, but … God, go read twenty books by other people instead.

Blech.

Five down

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I don’t have a ton to say about Dawnshard, the second of the two-so-far novellas in the Stormlight Archives. It’s a fun little story and gives a lot of screen time to Lopen, one of my favorite characters, although it introduces yet another set of adversaries and uses the word “Cosmere” too much. I’m finding that I don’t have a ton of patience for BrandySandy’s desire to knit each and every one of his books together into the same universe, particularly since the most obvious transfer so far has been the sword from Warbreaker and that was my least favorite of his books. I’m sure I’ve missed other bits here and there; it’s been forever since I read any of the Mistborn books and I don’t think I ever finished the second trilogy, but … blech. There’s no reason for it to be here and much like Lift and her constant use of the word “awesome,” It really doesn’t fit the tone of the rest of the series. Hell, it didn’t fit the tone of its own book, if I remember right, although I may not.

At least the cat didn’t piss on this one.

Four down

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Brandon Sanderson, you son of a bitch.

I made it 450 pages into Oathbringer when it first came out back in 2017. I was pissed when I decided I had to DNF it– but it had taken me a rather astonishing twelve days to make it those 450 pages (for comparison’s sake, on this reread, during a week where I was working, I finished the entire 1240-page thing in a week) and not only was I not having any fun with it I was finding myself slowly convinced that the book was on the side of the bad guys, and I wasn’t in the right headspace for it one way or another.

Well.

Oathbringer is boring as hell for 900 pages.

I mean, that’s really all there is to it. I can’t recommend reading this book to anyone. I can’t tell anybody to endure nine fucking hundred pages of wheel-spinning and navel-gazing and characters that desperately need to invent antidepressants and irrelevant subplots that could be excised in their entirety without affecting the overall structure of the book. It is exactly the type of bloat that so frequently settles into this type of megaseries, especially when the author has already proven themselves to be someone who could shit on a series of napkins, bind them between two covers, and sell a million copies. Sanderson’s untouchable, and I mean that as a compliment. He doesn’t need to write good books anymore. He can do whatever he wants.

I do not feel bad about abandoning this book on the first pass. I damn near didn’t make it on the second.

And, if anything, the most frustrating thing about this miserable slog of a novel is that the last, oh, 300 pages of the book are some of the most exciting shit he’s ever written. Somewhere toward the end of Part Four or the beginning of Part Five, this motherfucker steps on the gas and he absolutely does not let off until the book is done.

Which meant I was really Goddamned irritated when one of my fucking cats jumped on my chest while I was reading– not in itself a surprising event– and, with about 80 pages left, pissed on my fucking book.

It was a splat, not, like, a full-blast stream, and she somehow managed to not get a single drop on me or on the chair I was sitting in, but my cat fucking pissed on my book while I was reading the fucking thing and I somehow did not immediately kill her or throw her outside in retaliation.

And then, upon discovering Amazon can’t get me another hardcover copy for a couple of weeks and the only other new bookstore in town didn’t have any copies, I had to fucking finish the book after doing everything I could to, more or less unsuccessfully, soak everything up and banish the cat piss smell from my book.

The cat? Seems to be fine. I would immediately suspect a UTI, right? But I’ve had cats get UTIs in the past, and it generally involves lots of little pee accidents and a general feeling that maybe they’re struggling when they do pee, and this little asshole seems completely fine. We’re keeping an eye on her, obviously, and they were all due for vet appointments anyway, but right now I’m assuming this is some deeply weird and unexpected bit of shitheadery and not a sign of something more alarming.

This marks the second pet I’ve had that has ruined one or more of my books by pissing on them, but Hector at least did it while they were on the shelf and close to the floor and not in my Goddamned hands.

Christ.

At any rate, 3601 pages down, 2845 to go.

Three down

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Not much to brag about, I know— the Edgedancer novella is only around 40,000 words and the “prologue” is actually a chapter from Words of Radiance, so this took a couple of hours at most to get through today. I didn’t really love it; Sanderson says in the afterword that Lift is one of his favorite characters in the series, but the word “awesome” really doesn’t fit the tone of the first three books, and while it was okay to see it in that one interlude chapter, seeing it over and over and over again in this book gets kind of jarring.(*)

As far as Words of Radiance goes, I would compare it to A Clash of Kings; when you’re following up on one of the best fantasy novels out there, you can have a pretty serious drop off in quality and still be a really good book, and that’s what happens here. You start seeing the world really opening up in this book and a whole lot of different characters and organizations (there are at least three different groups, I think, who are trying to kill Elhokar? Four, if you count the Parshendi?) and I think you can be forgiven if your head is spinning a bit at the end of the book, particularly since a whole lot of major stuff happens in the last hundred and fifty pages (out of, remember, 1080) of the book. Even with all of that we’re still seeing some bloat; despite being the focus character in the book, Shallan doesn’t have nearly as much to do in this book as she did in the first one, and Kaladin kind of spends a lot of time spinning his wheels as well. There are also issues with plot armor; Kaladin being near-unkillable is a plot point so that’s not as big of a deal, but two other major characters are killed and then resurrected in this book. It still retains the propulsive energy and readability of the first book, though; I’ve read 2353 pages in five days, not counting whatever I manage from Oathbringer today, and I didn’t mean to finish Words of Radiance until today but chose to finish it instead of sleeping last night. And, again, it’s not a bad book, it just suffers in comparison to the first one.

This week will be the pivotal one. I don’t remember how far exactly I got into Oathbringer the first time but it wasn’t very far. If I finish it this week I think I’m probably good with finishing everything that’s been released. If I hit a brick wall again … we’ll see, I suppose.

(*) I’m also real real worried about that thing that that other thing says to Szeth at the very end of the book. And the thing itself also worries me. WordPress doesn’t support spoiler text AFAIK or I’d say more.

One down

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1001 pages read as of about 10:00 last night; as I’m typing this I’m just over a quarter of the way through the second book. Goal is to have that done by Sunday night, and then a couple of days for the first novella, and then I’m back to Oathbringer, which I haven’t finished yet.

This was my third read-through of The Way of Kings; I last read it when Words of Radiance came out in 2014. I had genuinely forgotten how good of a book it is; Sanderson gets lots of credit for his magic systems but the worldbuilding throughout this book is just superb, and the characters are some of my favorites in his canon. The Way of Kings does a tremendous job of lining up its mysteries; some things are absolutely not going to be explained in the first book, but just enough is revealed that you don’t feel like the whole book is a pointless mystery box. The book feels carefully planned in a way that first books of series often don’t, and that’s a hard thing to pull off.

I remain concerned about the Parshendi as an element of the series; it didn’t really sink in that the series felt like the “good guys” were the wrong side until Oathbringer came out, and that was definitely a major contributing factor to me abandoning it. The whole book just feels way too comfortable with “Hey, this entire species is our slaves, except for the ones we’re massacring, and those are constantly referred to as savages and monsters” for me, and I know full well it’s going to get worse. The thing is, in the years since Oathbringer I’ve literally never heard anyone make that criticism other than me, and it’s not like I have some sort of special insight. Like, people figured out that slavery was bad in the Harry Potter books, so … either they just didn’t apply that level of analysis to this book or maybe it gets resolved after I stopped reading. We’ll see, I guess.

Three book reviews

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It’s entirely possible that you’re going to get a flurry of posts today; I have at least three in the hopper right now and that’s only not five because I’m planning on packing three book reviews into a single post here. One of them is a super late entry into my best books of the year post, which right now is coming tomorrow, I think. We’ll see. Anyway, off we go:

Standard disclaimers, I suppose, for whenever I review an author who I “know” online; Kara and I have been mutuals long enough that I couldn’t tell you where we met or how long ago it was, and we tend to find each other near-immediately any time a new site pops up. That said, I’m a big fan of their Reanimator Mysteries series, the third book of which came out in October and I read a couple of days ago. Kara’s books tend to be(*) queer Victorian paranormal romances, and this one concerns Oliver Barlow, an autistic necromancer who works as a coroner, and Felipe Galvan, an investigator for New York’s Paranormal Society who is, uh, dead. And resurrected by Oliver. And they’re lovers now. And they can’t get more than half a mile apart.

It’s kind of a delightful series, believe it or not. The first sentence of the third book mentions “freshly rinsed organs.” It’s that kind of book.

Anyway, this one dives into both Felipe and Oliver’s pasts, and the main mystery of the book concerns the nearby town of Aldorhaven and a sudden infestation of the risen dead. Aldorhaven is a “murder town,” a decidedly unofficial designation for a place where the number of unexplained deaths and weird paranormal happenings is way above the norm. The town, and the forest surrounding it, become characters of a sort in this book, which has more than a little of The Shadow over Innsmouth‘s DNA in it. It’s wonderfully creepy in a whole lot of ways and you should probably grab the whole series, which starts with The Reanimator’s Heart and The Reanimator’s Soul. Book IV comes out next year.

(*) Tend to be? Possibly “always are”? This is Kara’s 10th book and I haven’t read them all.

I’ve been putting off picking up Marcus Kliewer’s We Used To Live Here until it came out on paperback, but Barnes & Noble’s still-ongoing end-of-year hardback sale and a couple of Christmas gift cards pushed me over the edge. The premise of this one is that a young couple has bought an old crumbling house high up on a mountain, planning on renovating and possibly flipping it, and one night a family of five shows up on their doorstep while Eve, one of the homeowners, is at home alone. The father claims that he used to live in the house, and asks if he can have fifteen minutes to show his family around. Eve reluctantly agrees, and … well, it doesn’t go well. This is psychological horror and not the murder-and-torturefest that “it doesn’t go well” implies there, but Eve basically spends the rest of the book going slowly crazy. It’s intense.

This, I think, is the most your-mileage-may-vary of the three books, because how much you enjoy this book is going to depend on how willing you are to 1) scour the text for clues that may or may not be in there and 2) live with ambiguity about what exactly is going on. Eve ends up unable to trust her own perceptions and her own memories about literally anything, and this is the kind of book that has little interstitials throughout, clips from interviews or TV shows or message board posts that initially won’t make sense but will tie together eventually, and all of them end with Morse code. I deciphered one and got the word “and” and decided that I didn’t need to decipher the rest. Maybe you will! Maybe that whole idea kind of annoys you. I have no idea if the Morse code is important or not. I know I didn’t bother to check.

Anyway, for me, this book started off as a great slow-burn mindfuck but sort of collapsed under its own weight by the end. I four-starred it on Goodreads, but you’ll need some tolerance for gaslighting and unexplained events and a wildly unintentionally unreliable narrator. By the end of the book if Eve so much as mentioned the color of something I was flipping back to see if that thing was the same color the last time she mentioned it. I don’t mind some ambiguity in this kind of book but it went a little beyond my comfort zone. You will doubt everything by the time the book ends, but the atmosphere and the oppressive quality of Kliewer’s writing meant I more or less finished this book cover-to-cover in a single sitting. You decide if that sounds like your type of thing.

I meant to hold off until paperback on the Kliewer book and ended up grabbing a hardback; I have this one in paperback and I regret not buying it sooner. Alexis Henderson’s debut, The Year of the Witching, was an Honorable Mention for my best books of 2020 list, and House of Hunger is better than Witching. It’s a vampire book in all but name; there is, in fact, no explicit magic or supernatural powers mentioned anywhere(*) in the book, but Marion, the main character, flees a life as a scullery maid to take a position as a Bloodmaiden in the ambiguously defined “north.” Her job is to provide her blood when her obscenely wealthy patroness, the Countess Lisavet, requests it. In return for seven years of indentured service, she will receive a huge pension for the rest of her life upon her retirement.

And, yeah, Lisavet isn’t a vampire, and neither are any of the other rich people in the book– blood is extracted through needles or occasionally through bites, and even when Marion is bitten it’s made clear that Lisavet is wearing prosthetic sharp fangs in order to puncture her skin. But there’s a whole lot of blood-drinking going on, and the closest the book gets to actual magic is mentions of things like “blood lamps,” which might just be regular lamps inside a hollow globe so that the light is red but might also be powered by blood somehow? It’s unclear. One way or another, Lisavet in particular is a fascinating character, and her relationship with Marion is really well-written and interesting, and when things inevitably go to hell at the end the horror is real. This book isn’t related to The Year of the Witching, and Henderson’s third book just came out and is also a standalone, but I’d love to see more about this world. I’m genuinely not sure if this is actually going to show up on the list tomorrow, but it’s definitely in the running. Check it out.

(*) Heavily implied, maybe, but not until late in the book.

#REVIEW: The Nightward, by R.S.A. Garcia

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I don’t know what to say about this one.

Now normally when I say something like that, it’s a bad sign. This isn’t that. The Nightward is a good book. But it is a good book in a very specific way, and the specific way it’s good makes it kinda hard to talk about. This is a book with lots of secrets, and lots of mysteries that may or may not be unraveled in the course of the text. In some ways it’s a very straightforward narrative and in some other ways I have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on.

Let me give you what I can: the basic narrative, as I said, is reasonably simple, and is spelled out pretty effectively on the cover: the two most prominent characters are Viella, the nine-year-old princess of the Queendom of Dun, and Luka, her bodyguard. Viella is only princess for a short time; there is a coup and her mother is killed, and the rest of the book is more or less about keeping her alive while the villains work various and sundry machinations in the background. Dun is one of six Queendoms– the book’s society is very matriarchal– and we see most of them for at least a little while over the course of the book.

(There’s a map at the beginning of the book. I probably should have paid more attention to the map. It’s that kind of book.)

Now, that doesn’t sound like much, I know. It’s R.S.A. Garcia’s worldbuilding that sets this book apart, though, and that’s part of what’s hard to talk about. There are queens everywhere and armies of badass women and pregnancy increases magical power to what appears to be a pretty substantial degree, and there are dragons and zombies and battle cats (which probably aren’t actually Battle Cat, but try and stop me) and then there’s a whole lot of other stuff going on that will make you go wait, what? and then you’ll start paying closer attention and there will be lots of hints, at first, and then later on outright blinking neon signs that Something Else Is Going On Here.

(The titular Nightward, by the way, is a book. It’s probably a spellbook of some sort, and the bad guys opening it was Definitely Bad. It … might not be a spellbook, though? Maybe.)

Do I know what the Something Else is? Nope. Not a bit.

And here’s the rub, right? I really liked this book, but it’s book one of a duology, and book two doesn’t come out until the end of 2025, and I kind of want to counsel you to put this on a wishlist and wait until book two comes out and then buy them both at once. Because I want it now, and the problem is I’m going to have read 150 books in between this one and the sequel and I’m gonna have to reread Book One anyway if I want to properly appreciate Book Two. And Garcia has an awful lot of plates spinning on poles right now, and not to mix metaphors or anything but I feel like sticking the landing properly on this is going to be challenging. If she pulls it off, this is going to be a truly remarkable series. If she doesn’t … well, you’re not going to be rereading Book One in the future if you didn’t like Book Two, right?

So. I five-starred this. I am very heavily anticipating the sequel, and I will preorder it the second I learn that it is available. And I want you to at least have it on your radar, but right now my recommendation is very much based on potential awesomeness, because there’s so much going on that’s not quite clear yet and I need a slightly clearer picture before I can start jumping up and down and waving this book over my head at people. Maybe hold off until late 2025, and then buy both of them at once. If you remember books better after a year than I do, jump in now, if only so I have someone to talk to about this. But definitely stick it in the back of your head, one way or another.