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Sep. 27th, 2015 12:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI read Full Fathom Five -- the third book in Max Gladstone's Craft sequence, set in a world where the economy runs on divine soul-power and therefore involves EXTENSIVE MAGICAL LAWYERING -- pretty soon after it came out last year, and then I forgot to write it up, and as a result I forgot most of what happened in it (my memory of things I've read is at this point distressingly externalized.)
So when the fourth book, Last First Snow, came out, I decided to reread Full Fathom Five first despite the fact that it is ... probably least directly tied in to Last First Snow of any of the other previous books.
Full Fathom Five is set on the island of Kavekana, which lost its gods in the God War several generations back and has now set up a nice little business for itself manufacturing idols to serve as a kind of divine tax haven for wealthy corporations. Our heroine is Kai, one of the priestess-accountants who administers the idols, who gets herself into trouble when she attempts drastic measures to save an idol that's about to die due to bad investments. The drastic measures go wrong, but in the process Kai gets caught up in an overarching divine corporate conspiracy that may destabilize the entire nature of the idol business.
Intellectually, I liked the book a lot. Kai is a wonderful character, whose greatest flaw is that she's just a little too loyal, just a little too dedicated; she's also trans -- a fact which has little relevance to the plot except inasmuch as Kai's experiences impact her own reaction to certain persons and events, which I also very much appreciated. And I liked the way Gladstone depicts the island of Kavekana in general, with its beauty and its trade-offs. (The Penitents -- essentially giant stone mind-altering Gundams that criminals get dumped into, trapped and screaming, until they're mentally reshaped into the Penitent's idea of a productive citizen -- are one of the most believable governmental-structural horrors I've read in a while.)
I was however not as invested in the B-plot, and sort of perplexed by the fact that I wasn't invested in it. Like, I really should have loved it? It's about a plucky street urchin! A plucky street urchin who's trying to GET OUT OF THE LIFE because too many other plucky street urchins depend on her, but just when she thinks she's out, THEY PULL HER BACK IN. But I don't know, I never quite bought Plucky Street Urchin Izza, and while I did buy Kai, that may have been enough to stop me from fully emotionally committing to the story.
Last First Snow, on the other hand. Last First Snow has jumped straight up to become my second-favorite book in the series, right up against Three Parts Dead, which I did not expect at ALL -- I didn't much like the other book set in Dresediel Lex, Two Serpents Rise, and when I found out this was a prequel I was like 'oh, uh ... really? Well .... okay .....'
Last First Snow focuses on a younger (but not young) Elayne Kevarian, the chief lawyer mentor of the protagonist of Three Parts Dead, who is currently engaged in attempting to broker a magical-wards agreement that looks likely to result in the rapid gentrification of the Skittersill, a run-down area of Dresediel Lex. The inhabitants of the Skittersill are protesting vociferously -- including Temoc, priest of some now extremely dead or defeated Aztec-esque gods, who's spent the last ten years rebuilding a life and religious identity for himself as a dedicated family man who doesn't perform human sacrifice.
Elayne and Temoc, old kind-of-friends or at least respectable enemies after being on opposite sides of the God Wars forty years ago, are attempting to negotiate a compromise that will satisfy all the parties involved without violence breaking out. Unfortunately, between the still-open wounds of the war and the demands of corporate greed, their odds are not that great.
Temoc is the father of the protagonist of Two Serpents Rise, and I loved him reluctantly in that book until he did an unforgivable thing. In this book he also is amazing and then does another, EQUALLY OR EVEN MORE unforgivable thing and I've sort of come to terms with the fact that I love him anyway -- I complained about the inevitable human-sacrifice factor of an Aztec-based culture in Two Serpents Rise, but after this book I think I have, kicking and screaming, come round. FINE, Max Gladstone, I DO think your take on human sacrifice and the way you humanize the kind of religion and religious activity that we're taught to think of as inescapably horrific is interesting and well-done. ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?
And, I mean, of course I loved Last First Snow -- not only is it a book about magical city planning, community organizing, gentrification, and the long-term fallout of revolution and cultural change, BUT it's also a BARRICADE BOOK and we ALL KNOW how I feel about barricade books. (Let's not even talk about the Major and all of my exceedingly predictable feelings about the Major. I'm sorry! I can't help who I am!)
Okay, Max Gladstone, bring on whatever the next thing is. I'M READY. (I'll be especially ready if it includes Tara, who despite my fondness for Elayne and Temoc and Kai is still my all-time favorite.)
So when the fourth book, Last First Snow, came out, I decided to reread Full Fathom Five first despite the fact that it is ... probably least directly tied in to Last First Snow of any of the other previous books.
Full Fathom Five is set on the island of Kavekana, which lost its gods in the God War several generations back and has now set up a nice little business for itself manufacturing idols to serve as a kind of divine tax haven for wealthy corporations. Our heroine is Kai, one of the priestess-accountants who administers the idols, who gets herself into trouble when she attempts drastic measures to save an idol that's about to die due to bad investments. The drastic measures go wrong, but in the process Kai gets caught up in an overarching divine corporate conspiracy that may destabilize the entire nature of the idol business.
Intellectually, I liked the book a lot. Kai is a wonderful character, whose greatest flaw is that she's just a little too loyal, just a little too dedicated; she's also trans -- a fact which has little relevance to the plot except inasmuch as Kai's experiences impact her own reaction to certain persons and events, which I also very much appreciated. And I liked the way Gladstone depicts the island of Kavekana in general, with its beauty and its trade-offs. (The Penitents -- essentially giant stone mind-altering Gundams that criminals get dumped into, trapped and screaming, until they're mentally reshaped into the Penitent's idea of a productive citizen -- are one of the most believable governmental-structural horrors I've read in a while.)
I was however not as invested in the B-plot, and sort of perplexed by the fact that I wasn't invested in it. Like, I really should have loved it? It's about a plucky street urchin! A plucky street urchin who's trying to GET OUT OF THE LIFE because too many other plucky street urchins depend on her, but just when she thinks she's out, THEY PULL HER BACK IN. But I don't know, I never quite bought Plucky Street Urchin Izza, and while I did buy Kai, that may have been enough to stop me from fully emotionally committing to the story.
Last First Snow, on the other hand. Last First Snow has jumped straight up to become my second-favorite book in the series, right up against Three Parts Dead, which I did not expect at ALL -- I didn't much like the other book set in Dresediel Lex, Two Serpents Rise, and when I found out this was a prequel I was like 'oh, uh ... really? Well .... okay .....'
Last First Snow focuses on a younger (but not young) Elayne Kevarian, the chief lawyer mentor of the protagonist of Three Parts Dead, who is currently engaged in attempting to broker a magical-wards agreement that looks likely to result in the rapid gentrification of the Skittersill, a run-down area of Dresediel Lex. The inhabitants of the Skittersill are protesting vociferously -- including Temoc, priest of some now extremely dead or defeated Aztec-esque gods, who's spent the last ten years rebuilding a life and religious identity for himself as a dedicated family man who doesn't perform human sacrifice.
Elayne and Temoc, old kind-of-friends or at least respectable enemies after being on opposite sides of the God Wars forty years ago, are attempting to negotiate a compromise that will satisfy all the parties involved without violence breaking out. Unfortunately, between the still-open wounds of the war and the demands of corporate greed, their odds are not that great.
Temoc is the father of the protagonist of Two Serpents Rise, and I loved him reluctantly in that book until he did an unforgivable thing. In this book he also is amazing and then does another, EQUALLY OR EVEN MORE unforgivable thing and I've sort of come to terms with the fact that I love him anyway -- I complained about the inevitable human-sacrifice factor of an Aztec-based culture in Two Serpents Rise, but after this book I think I have, kicking and screaming, come round. FINE, Max Gladstone, I DO think your take on human sacrifice and the way you humanize the kind of religion and religious activity that we're taught to think of as inescapably horrific is interesting and well-done. ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?
And, I mean, of course I loved Last First Snow -- not only is it a book about magical city planning, community organizing, gentrification, and the long-term fallout of revolution and cultural change, BUT it's also a BARRICADE BOOK and we ALL KNOW how I feel about barricade books. (Let's not even talk about the Major and all of my exceedingly predictable feelings about the Major. I'm sorry! I can't help who I am!)
Okay, Max Gladstone, bring on whatever the next thing is. I'M READY. (I'll be especially ready if it includes Tara, who despite my fondness for Elayne and Temoc and Kai is still my all-time favorite.)
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Date: 2015-09-27 05:53 pm (UTC)I'm really looking forward to Last First Snow precisely for Temoc, because he was for me the best part of Two Serpents Rise; I liked Teo and Sam, but I found Caleb and Mal alternately uninteresting and infuriating, which is a bad set of reactions for your ostensible protagonists to produce in the reader. I still need to read Full Fathom Five, though.
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Date: 2015-09-27 05:59 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2015-09-27 07:38 pm (UTC)I don't remember being upset about the ending with Temoc, oddly. I do remember disliking everything about Caleb and Mal so thoroughly that I have trouble imagining myself re-reading the book except maybe to see how it follows on from Last First Snow.
Are there to be five books in the series, or is it open-ended?
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Date: 2015-09-29 03:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-29 03:14 am (UTC)I hope he continues to mosaic the series plot, then, because that's been tremendously fun to watch.
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Date: 2015-09-27 05:58 pm (UTC)Last First Snow was excellent though, and definitely my second fave after Three Parts Dead.
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Date: 2015-09-27 06:01 pm (UTC)LFS I am still sorting out my feelings about, ha, NOT LEAST BECAUSE I actually! had completely avoided spoilers, reading the blurb, etc! SO IT WASN'T UNTIL CALEB SHOWS UP AGE 7 THAT I REALISED WHERE IN THE TIMELINE WE WERE it was actually pretty brilliant.
(... I was also super into Caleb and Mal. Oh, who do I think I'm kidding, I just love everyone in this series, even the King in Red.)
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Date: 2015-09-27 06:10 pm (UTC)-- oh man, that must have been a heck of a way to read it! I was braced somewhat, but STILL not as braced as I should have been.
I ALSO KIND OF LOVE THE KING IN RED although much less than I did after Two Serpents Rise. Actually I had sort of the same reaction to the King in Red this book as I did to Temoc in that book -- 'come on, I was so fond of you, why you gotta do these things that make me less fond of you? D:' The tables have turned! There's still just something inherently lovable about an awkward skeleton though.
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Date: 2017-07-16 08:27 am (UTC)Oh my goodness Two Serpents Cross is a massive fucking slog! I loved Three Parts Dead (which I first read on your rec a couple of years ago) SO MUCH and then 2SR, which I've just finished, was so . . . the protagonist and his motivations were so tedious that I started to resent how good the world building and other characters were. Like, why are we wasting all this awesome on "Boy sees girl from distance and makes bad decisions because she's hot; girl is impressed by boy's persistence despite the fact (a) she clearly has more important things going on and (b) as an adult woman of striking beauty in a world borrowing heavily from our gender dynamics, this is not going to be her first time on the creepy stalker rodeo"???
*exhales loudly* But now I've got that off my chest, yay! I'm delighted that the next one is better, and that the one after that is better still.
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Date: 2017-07-22 01:29 pm (UTC)Just finished Full Fathom Five, and ooh, I totally agree with you about Izza. I think I didn't bounce off her as much as you did, but I was definitely less interested in her than I was in Kai, and I think a lot of that is that Izza just doesn't seem like a child? There's nothing in what she does, how she acts, how she thinks about things that's any different from how Gladstone writes his adults -- like, I guess part of what he was trying to do is make the street urchin more jaded than the banker, which is nice and all, but I ended up feeling that the only reason she was written as 15 rather than 20 was to have a tidy plot reason that she hadn't yet been punished as an adult for her crimes.
Kai, on the other hand, is amazing and compelling and I loved her to pieces, plus Gladstone's worldbuliding is so wonderful, omg.
I am excited to read Last First Snow! :D
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Date: 2017-07-22 09:46 pm (UTC)I sort of wonder how I would react to Izza on a second read, but yeah, I agree. Like, it takes a lot of skill to write a plausibly adult-before-her-years street kid who still feels like a kid -- it's a weird balance and I understand why Gladstone couldn't quite stick that landing -- but it does lessen her impact as a character, I think, not to make us feel that she is a kid in all that.
BUT THE WORLDBUILDING, SO GOOD!!!! I just want to like suck some of the creative worldbuilding juices out of Gladstone's brain for next time I'm doing second-world stuff . ... but like. not in a creepy way. um.
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Date: 2017-07-22 09:47 pm (UTC)