Max Gladstone
Getting back into the swing of things with a mega post! I'm reviewing all four currently released books in Max Gladstone's The Craft Sequence series. Some quick notes before I get started:
- I'm going to provide a quick description of each book, and my opinion on each one. At the end of the post there'll be a retrospective and overview of how I feel about the whole series.
- These books are in a weird order. That is, the chronological order in which the books take place is not the same as the order in which they were written and published. I'm going to be reviewing in order of publication, and if I refer to "the first book", I mean the first book published. Fun fact, the chronological order is in the name of each book!
Alright, now let's get started!
Three Parts Dead
Man this is such a good book. Like damn, what a great book.
I remember reading a while back that this whole series was inspired by the financial collapse of 2008. I don't know if I made that up, but it sounds legit. If that seems boring to you, just wait.
Magic is Craft, the enforcing of contracts and obligations which use the starfire which power souls to bring water to the desert, hide great universities in the clouds, and bind the dead to service. And, you know, a lot of other stuff too. Magic too is divinity, the exchange of faith and soul for safety, fertility, and strength to fight.
Three Parts Dead takes place seventy odd years after the God Wars, an aptly titled conflict in which Craftswomen took to the skies and broke the gods on their own altars, freeing humanity from the divine yokes of brutal gods. At least, in most places.
The city of Alt Coulomb is the domain of Kos Everburning, god of fire who has adjusted to the world of the Craft, binding himself via contracts to Deathless Kings (Craftsmen who have transcended the mortal coil) and other gods alike, whose city is policed by Justice, a construct built out of the corpse of his consort goddess who died in the war. The only remaining divine city in the New World.
And then, suddenly, Kos dies. Three Parts Dead follows Craftswomen and priests as they seek to understand the cause of his death, and negotiate for his resurrection against those to whom he owed debts.
Isn't that just fuckin cool? Is that just me?
Ahem. Anyways. It's a legal thriller and a mystery and a urban fantasy and whatever the fuck else. It's unique. It's like nothing I've really read before, and that's amazing!
Two Serpents Rise
We leave our protagonists of Three Parts Dead and Alt Coulomb for the city of Dresediel Lex, once the domain of savage and brutal gods who traded human sacrifice for grace, now overseen by Red King Consolidated and the Red King himself.
The book follows Caleb Altemoc, a mid-level risk manager at RKC who also happens to be the son of the last of the Eagle Knights, the warrior-priests of the old gods.
One day, there are demons in the water. More things start going wrong. A god commits suicide to bring down the main power station of the city. The water runs black. People dream of great snakes, writhing in the fire beneath the earth.
More of a mystery than the previous book, this is less of plot-focused story and more of a character driven one. That's not a bad thing at all, but it is a bit of a change. Thankfully, the characters are strong enough to bear the burden.
This isn't as wow as Three Parts Dead, but I think that's just because it comes after such a unique concept, and by fleshing it out, is relegated to the background by necessity. Still a very fun book, and well worth your time.
Full Fathom Five
Chronologically the last book in the series, we again leave our previous protagonists behind and are brought to what can only be described as an offshore tax haven for souls. The priests of Kavekana construct idols, shadows of gods which fulfill only the basic exchanges of soulstuff for grace. One day, an idol dying of a bad investment speaks in her death throes, something they're absolutely not supposed to do.
Familiar faces begin to show up in this book, side characters from the previous novels play subtle but important roles as the story progresses. It's fun to see what old characters have gotten up to, but it's probably the weakest entry in the series. Not by much, and it's still a fun read, but somehow it's less memorable than the others, even though it has it's share of really cool moments.
Sidebar: I will say this: Gladstone has a way of coming up with absolutely the worst police forces one can possibly imagine. First Justice in Alt Coulomb, and now the Penitents of Kavekana, giant stone statues in which criminals are put to be tortured and brainwashed until they can be considered reformed enough to join society as broken creatures, forced to conform.
Last First Snow
We return to Dresediel Lex, twenty years before the events of Two Serpents rise. This time, the protagonists are Temoc, Caleb's priest father, and Elayne, the mentor of Tara Abernathy, who was the main character in Three Parts Dead.
Elayne is working with the Red King and the ostensible owner of one of the slums of the city, attempting to rework the wards and protect the area from disaster while opening it up for development. Temoc represents the people living in the slums, as they protest the actions which will drive them from their homes.
This is a brutal book. The fact that it's chronologically before the second book makes the inevitable conclusion incredibly hard to bear as you watch and wait for everything to devolve into chaos.
I think, in the end, it's a book about choices. About people who don't have choices, or who feel like they don't have choices, and about why they make their choices. I don't think there's a single person who I can say is wrong in the choices they make (okay maybe one, and although they're important they're not one of the real main characters). These are people who feel real, fighting against the inevitability of conflict. The fact that Gladstone pulls this off without making it sappy or grimdark is remarkable.
This is tied with Three Parts Dead for my favorite entry in the series. That is saying something.
Final Thoughts
Like I've said, these books represent such a unique take on the fantasy genre, like nothing I've seen before and yet somehow familiar in the way that all the best ideas are. As if they were out there all along, just waiting for someone to find their perfect expression.
The prose is excellent, serving the plot well in most places, and shining through with phrases that make me sit back and read them again with goosebumps in a few beautiful moments. Perhaps my one complaint would be that the fight scenes tend to be a little confusing, lacking the flow and beat of Butcher or Sanderson.
I really strongly recommend you read these books. Even if you don't normally like fantasy novels, these are something else. At least give the first one a try. If you don't like that, you won't like the sequels. If you do, you'll like the rest of the series, to varying degrees.
Also, the final? book is coming out this July, entitled Four Roads Cross which returns to the city of Alt Coulomb and the characters from Three Parts Dead. I'm excited.
Is this the return of blog posts? Find out next time on LeoTalksAboutBooksALot
-Leo
