Monday 8 May 2017

Full Fathom Five / Last First Snow

Max Gladstone, 2014/2015
(April 2017)
  


OK, so I’m aware that there’s a sixth installment of the Craft Sequence coming out later this year, but I think I’m going to hold off on the rest for the immediate future. I think Gladstone is better at ending books than beginning them.

This isn’t really much of a complaint, as he’s very good at ending them, but the temptation (not helped by buying the first five all together in a single ebook omnibus) is then to bounce straight out of one and into the next. Over the last month or so I’ve found myself doing exactly that, only to get about a quarter of the way into the following book and lose momentum. This says more about me than the books, of course, but there it is. As I write this I find myself wanting to keep straight on to Four Roads Cross, which I’ve heard is a doozy, but suspect that I should probably pause a little and try to experience each installment as a single whole, rather than part of an interrupted conglomeration of parts. For what it’s worth, however, for all that the flashing out of Temoc was well executed, I’m not quite as enamoured of the location and characters of Dresidiel Lex and the author seems to be. Given the hints we got in Full Fathom Five, however, it’s all too easy to credit the rumours of the excellence of Four Roads Cross. We shall see just how well my willpower holds out.


No comments:

Post a Comment