(no subject)

[skygiants]

I enjoyed Martha Wells' Wheel of the Infinite but I am also pretty sure that my reading experience was devised in exactly the wrong way to allow me to appreciate the plot as a coherent narrative.

I read the first half of the book on the plane between San Francisco and Chicago, which meant I got all the fantastic initial setup: a long-suffering middle-aged heroine, exiled from her home city for accidentally getting three husbands killed while following the wrong prophetic vision, accidentally rescues a cute swordsman in a brief break from protecting a plucky theater troupe from a cursed stage puppet!

Then the cute young swordsman immediately decides to be her joint boyfriend and bodyguard because he has nothing else to do with his life, and she's like "he followed me home, can I keep him? ...wait I'm an exiled superpowered divine avatar, I literally don't have to ask anyone else, I CAN JUST KEEP HIM :D" and then he and she and the theater troupe all go back to her home city to sort out a potentially apocalyptic problem in the annual setting-the-world-in-order religious ritual and also, very importantly, get the theater puppet un-cursed, and at about this point I got to Chicago and although I was enjoying myself immensely I didn't really have time to read another word until I was on a flight back to Boston.

So at this point I opened my Kobo again and VERY SUDDENLY the entire temple and all the main characters were trapped in a barren world from which the only way to escape was to allow a deranged god to destroy all the inhabitants? I DON'T KNOW, THIS FELT LIKE A TURN.

(I also felt like there was not nearly enough time and narrative energy devoted to the emotional fallout from 'no, it wasn't that you were wrong and got people killed and ruined your life, it was that God was STRAIGHT-UP LYING TO YOU to get people killed and ruin your life.' But it is entirely possible that I would not have felt this jarred if I had been reading straight through!)

Comments

[opusculasedfera]

I don't remember finding it jarring when I read it, which was more or less in one gulp, or at least over no more than a couple of days. On the other hand, I'll admit that the bits I remember best are all concentrated in the first half and are mainly about the theatre troupe and Maskelle's general long-sufferingness. I enjoyed the whole thing though!

[skygiants]

Yeah, it's not that the second part was bad, it just felt like a lot of plot towards the end got kind of crammed into slightly too small a space. Also watching them wander anxiously around the dead world was a lot less fun for me than hanging out in the primary world, where something went comically wrong with a theater performance every night!

[rachelmanija]

Well, that escalated quickly.

[skygiants]

It did indeed feel that way! But the theater troupe and the cursed puppet were great.

[melita66]

City of Bones has a similar dimensional shift. Hmmm, all of the earlier books (Ile-Rien) have some sort of dimensional/world gate travel. Is that a spoiler? Possibly. So definitely a trope.

I love me some Wells. The Raksura books are loads of fun. Tremaine in the Fall of Ile-Rien series is another strong, no-nonsense, will-do-whatever-it-takes character whom I dearly love.

Her new Murderbot Diaries series of novellas (1 out, next out in January) features a snarky, free-of-restrictive-programming security android who loves to binge on tv dramas.