Three Parts Dead (Gladstone)
Sep. 12th, 2018 06:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnSomeone (julianyap, perhaps?) recced this book to me five years ago and I bought it while it was on sale, and read the first, maybe, five percent, and around that time a bunch of life stuff happened and I got away from it, and I didn't feel strongly enough about the characters to come back and read the rest of it.
Then I saw K and B this spring (yes, in fact, this is how behind I am in my reading) and B asked me if I'd read it. I said no, I'd just read the very beginning, and he told me about this whole -- I guess these are spoilers, but only for the first twenty percent of the book, and I'm not putting it under spoiler cut because this is in fact what convinced me to read the book -- this whole worldbuilding where the idea of a god is that it lends out power to people who need it, and later the god gets it back with some, oh, let's call it interest, tacked on, and all of this is mediated by Craft, which is this world's equivalent of magic and is expressed through contracts. And then the bright idea was had to lend out more power than the god actually possessed -- yes! fractional reserve, er, theology -- and it is possible to become defunct because a small drain in power triggers others to drain power too, and before you know it you have a run on the b -- god!
"That is amazing," I said, and I resolved to read it, which I have now done. And I enjoyed it a lot because of this worldbuilding, and it's very plotty and I enjoyed that a lot too. And I liked all the characters, especially the female ones -- Tara was great, Elayne was great, Cat was great, and I loved that they were also so different and had such different stories and motivations.
I still will confess that while I liked the worldbuilding a very great deal, I felt a little like both characters and worldbuilding were sort of shoehorned into the particular format that the author wanted? Like, I'm not sure Craft makes total sense to me -- sometimes it's portrayed as being able to do these super powerful things, and sometimes as the laws binding and putting limits on power, and I never got a good sense of what those limits were from scene to scene. (I mean, obviously it's going to be a bit inconsistent, that's why it's a magic drama and not a courtroom drama, but, say, in the Earthsea books I felt like I at least could pretend like I had a sense of when you could and couldn't unleash a whole boatload of magic, and why.) I also thought it was a little unbelievable that Tara made the choice she did in the middle/second-half of the book, regarding how to pursue her case, because nothing in the way she'd been presented up to that time made it sound to me that she had any inclination to make that choice.
But I am still really interested in reading the next one :D
julianyap, perhaps?) recced this book to me five years ago and I bought it while it was on sale, and read the first, maybe, five percent, and around that time a bunch of life stuff happened and I got away from it, and I didn't feel strongly enough about the characters to come back and read the rest of it.Then I saw K and B this spring (yes, in fact, this is how behind I am in my reading) and B asked me if I'd read it. I said no, I'd just read the very beginning, and he told me about this whole -- I guess these are spoilers, but only for the first twenty percent of the book, and I'm not putting it under spoiler cut because this is in fact what convinced me to read the book -- this whole worldbuilding where the idea of a god is that it lends out power to people who need it, and later the god gets it back with some, oh, let's call it interest, tacked on, and all of this is mediated by Craft, which is this world's equivalent of magic and is expressed through contracts. And then the bright idea was had to lend out more power than the god actually possessed -- yes! fractional reserve, er, theology -- and it is possible to become defunct because a small drain in power triggers others to drain power too, and before you know it you have a run on the b -- god!
"That is amazing," I said, and I resolved to read it, which I have now done. And I enjoyed it a lot because of this worldbuilding, and it's very plotty and I enjoyed that a lot too. And I liked all the characters, especially the female ones -- Tara was great, Elayne was great, Cat was great, and I loved that they were also so different and had such different stories and motivations.
I still will confess that while I liked the worldbuilding a very great deal, I felt a little like both characters and worldbuilding were sort of shoehorned into the particular format that the author wanted? Like, I'm not sure Craft makes total sense to me -- sometimes it's portrayed as being able to do these super powerful things, and sometimes as the laws binding and putting limits on power, and I never got a good sense of what those limits were from scene to scene. (I mean, obviously it's going to be a bit inconsistent, that's why it's a magic drama and not a courtroom drama, but, say, in the Earthsea books I felt like I at least could pretend like I had a sense of when you could and couldn't unleash a whole boatload of magic, and why.) I also thought it was a little unbelievable that Tara made the choice she did in the middle/second-half of the book, regarding how to pursue her case, because nothing in the way she'd been presented up to that time made it sound to me that she had any inclination to make that choice.
But I am still really interested in reading the next one :D
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Date: 2018-09-14 12:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-09-14 04:42 am (UTC)