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tannat

Tannat

Not so much a blog; just lots of books

Currently reading

The Grace Year
Kim Liggett
The New Voices of Science Fiction
Jamie Wahls, Sarah Pinkser, Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Rebecca Roanhorse, S. Qiouyi Lu, Darcie Little Badger, Kelly Robson, Nino Cipri, Amal El-Mohtar, Sam J. Miller, E. Lily Yu, Alice Sola Kim, Suzanne Palmer, Alexander Weinstein, Rich Larson
Progress: 13%
Engineering Animals: How Life Works
Alan Mcfadzean, Mark Denny
Progress: 125/314pages
The Rise of Yeast: How the Sugar Fungus Shaped Civilization
Nicholas P. Money
Conservation of Shadows
Yoon Ha Lee
Progress: 22%
Le premier jour
Marc Levy
Progress: 180/496pages
Moby-Dick: or, The Whale (Penguin Classics)
Herman Melville
Manifold: Time
Stephen Baxter, Chris Schluep
Progress: 99/480pages
The Long War
Stephen Baxter, Terry Pratchett
Progress: 68/501pages

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

Three Parts Dead - Max Gladstone

Series: Craft Sequence #1

 

This book basically has necromantic wizard lawyers dealing with contract law with gods.  So Tara Abernathy, a junior associate from Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao whose whole professional future depends on success, gets called in to help with the resurrection of Kos, a recently-deceased god.  There is no doubt that Kos will be resurrected (mostly), but how much of His old self He gets to keep depends on how well the Craftsman representing His creditors argues in their favour with respect to the power owed to them against how well Kos’s defence Craftswomen (Tara and her boss, Ms. Kevarian) represent His interests and His blamelessness in His own demise.

 

So, all in all, it was a kind of fun, kind of weird world that I found interesting.  I liked the book, but for some reason my attention kept wandering while I was actually trying to read it.  I liked the very final scene: finishing the book off that way helped bump it back up to 3 stars from 2.5 for me.  What had dragged the book down to that murky 2.5-star region was the tendency to outright drop a couple pages of mostly unnecessary background information on top of the clumsy way information was parcelled out between the characters in dialogue.  And then there were the climatic explanation scenes where our heroes and villains basically explained what had actually happened earlier in the book.  You know that kind of explanatory stand-off scene?  Yeah.

 

In spite of some of the clumsiness, I’ll probably check out the sequels eventually to see if they turn out any better.  It also looks like they feature different characters, so they’re not strict sequels.  Plus I kind of want to get to the third one because I like the title Full Fathom Five.

 

I did like the thing with the cigarette.