Onefinemess

by: Steven Erikson

OK.  I admit it, I had the lowest expectations I’ve had yet going into this series.  Why?  Because it was YET ANOTHER entirely new cast.  OK, that’s not quite true – this is the backstory, or some of it at least, for a character introduced last book.  Sort of like how House of Chains had that 200 page backstory for Karsa, who was first introduced 2 books before that.  Except 5 times as long, and much more interesting.

The book did start very slow.  Like books 1 & 4.  However, it picked up with more of a vengeance as it had some pretty interesting characters.  Tehol Beddict is awesome.  Not awesome enough for me to remember his name without looking him up, but with 200+ (?) characters, that would have to be pretty damn awesome.  Annnyway.  So, it seems like this book takes place from a little before book one to well into book 3 – in the beginning it mentions the ascension of the two wolves to the Beast Throne that happened in Memories of Ice… of course, the raid that wiped out a city in Memories of Ice… I thought that was supposed to be the Edur too, so that would really throw things off.

It explains the background of that watery realm we keep seeing in the other books, more or less.  I still don’t get how we got from this book to the opening of House of Chains & Trull’s introduction… I suppose that’s the next book?  Or maybe it’s just all left between.  We see some of Trull’s descendants (from that wacky encounter with the Eres at the end of House of Chains) and learn more about the world’s early years.   Yeah, lots of stuff, kind of pointless to try and list it all, I wonder why I tried?

All in all, I found this book slightly better than the previous ones, so I think I’m going to have to bump the rating up.

THREE AND THREE QUARTER STARS

And now, I’m going to take a break from Malazan and read… another Malazan book!?  Yes, it’s true.  That’s what happens when you have two separate author’s writing two mostly separate series set in the same world.  Bizarre.  I’m trying to kind of keep them in sequence between the two series and, as I understand it, book one of the other series takes place before book one of this series, then book 2 at some point after book 6?  Yeah, so confusing.  But, what good is fantasy if it doesn’t ask us to use our brains, right?

 

Tags: Malazan Book of the Fallen, Steven Erikson

This entry was posted by onefinemess on Sunday, June 12th, 2011 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Book Review, Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.