Read February 2024 Recommended for fans of the series ★ ★ ★ Everything I loved in Dead Country, book one of the new Craft trilogy has been lost. Actually, to be specific, it has been jumped up with an injection of epinephrine straight into the heart. Instead of one main character, we have five or six; instead of heading home for a funeral, we have chasing a wayward student across the continents, instead of --well, at the risk of getting spoilery, I'll just say, instead of small scale-village conflicts, we have city and continent-wide ones. It was the literary version of Speed turned into Crank.
The Prologue begins with Dawn and Sybil, the snake manifestation last seen in Dead Country. This is good; when Dawn spells out her mission for us, it starts us on solid footing in story continuity and recalling recent events. Then we start the jumping, beginning with Caleb Altemoc, seen in Two Serpents Rise (2013), my least favorite book in the series, and Last First Snow (2015). We will jump heads to Abelard (Three Parts Dead, 2012, and Four Roads Cross, 2016), Kai (Full Fathom Five, 2014) and Temoc (LFS). Confused? Me too! While you don't have to have read all these books, but it will likely probably help because this is, quite frankly, a Team Superhero novel. Heavy on action, full of grandiose but strangely non-specific agendas ("stop them"), slim on characterization (except instant loyalty and inklings of affection) and generally, just a very different direction than I was expecting after Dead Country.
Dawn's narrative is the interlinking voice in this story. I appreciated the complicated picture we get of her and Sybil, and how that contrasts with that of the other characters. I liked her voice. The one I had to most trouble with were Caleb and Kai, who are essentially working adults now, and whose language and thoughts feel like that of modern professionals: "Descending in stocking feet with her heels in her handbag was about as much fun as Kai would have guessed. She got splashed by the maelstrom and clipped by a rock shard once. But she did not die, which was nice." It led to some moments of mental incongruity.
Speaking of incongruity, I felt like there were more moments of them in this book, although its hard to be sure when I'm speaking from memory. Kai, for instance, talks about going blind dates through a service using demonic algorithms, a clear (and unneeded) commentary on dating apps, and her date talking about the new book "of a forty-book series of thrillers about some itinerant special-forces type who bought fresh pairs of underwear rather than doing laundry." Yes, yes; we get the Reacher reference. Why is it there? Have you sacrificed your story's pathos for a moment of modern social humor and/or commentary? I think so.
What saved it for me is that Gladstone tries very hard to create a 'both sides could be right,' a great philosophical challenge--albeit one that none of the characters have the time for, much like a superhero movie. We will do this thing because I have said I will do it, for the moral stance of it all. It's this depth to the characters that I appreciate.
"No trace remained but Dawn's memory and the pirate's expression. Dawn though, This woman has not been a pirate all her life. She was a child once. She had parents. She became this thing, of her own will or not. She was not quips and daring and cutlasses down to the atoms.
There was no secret, Tara had said in the graveyard. Just hurt people on the same side."
One of the strongest parts of Gladstone's writing is the emotional and situational complexity:
"'You hoped she was dead.
He looked out at the horizon. "I hoped she was out of it. Away from gods and Craftsmen and the Wars you all talk about like they're over. She was not a good person or a nice person and she hurt a lot of people including me. Including herself. I didn't want her to hurt anyone else."
There are some very creative scenes, and it is certainly action-filled, so it pulls one along with momentum. Despite the too-obvious intrusions of the modern American world into the story, I will keep returning for the creative world-building, the questions of ideology, and the exceptional prose.
Many thanks to NetGalley for an arc of this story. Of course, opinions are my own. Quotes are subject to change in the final publication, of course, but give an idea of what to expect.
No comments:
Post a Comment