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4.25 AVERAGE
4.25 AVERAGE
Tiene toda la pinta de ser una mera transición hacia la tercera parte de la saga.
It's a good book, but I always struggle to pick up and stick with it after Gardens of the Moon. I've read the whole series, I know the course some of these characters are already on and it's hard to enjoy at times. The Desert, Raraku, the Rebellion really aren't my favourite bits of the series. Though other pivotal things are happening which all ties together neatly further down the line.
This is also the first taste we get of how vast in scope in the series really is. The action has moved to another continent, with but a handful of familiar characters and many new faces. Not a lot seems connected at first, but all the threads are there to be weaved together now or later. It sets the standard for the rest of the series but this first time is always a little jarring.
“Children are dying."
Lull nodded. "That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words."
What an exceptional book! Even though the plot is of the fantasy genre, the writing and story is, at its heart, about themes like the above. War, with all its gore has been painted with some strong brushes in this amazing book, the second in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. The mood is always quite sobering in the world of this series. But it's not without its humour, which is of the dry kind shared among kindred spirits who face death daily and have gotten used to it enough to taunt it. In fact, the conversations and thoughts are often hilarious and contrasts with the grimness surrounding them. Like the below when the historian of an army is searching for the camp of the engineers who are always hard to locate.
Though he looked, Duiker could not see its location, but he knew well what he'd find. Look for the most disordered collection of tents and foul-smelling vapors aswarm with mosquitoes and gnats and you'll have found Malazan Engineers. And in that quarter you'll find soldiers shaking like leaves, with splash-burn pockmarks, singed hair and a dark, manic gleam in their eyes.
I couldn't help but smile thinking of my own engineering days and, while it may not be as bad as described above, the sentiment couldn't be more fitting.
Strong, gritty writing. Humor. Two great things already.
Then there are the characters. It seems like there are so many characters, and there are, but it's also because even if a character is a guard who appears once or twice and then is killed in a battle, he is given a name and probably a bit of background. I ended up feeling a kinship to characters I would otherwise not have given a second glance to. And you are not even allowed to hate a character properly. In one portion, a bunch of elite soldiers turn up with the intention of bullying citizens who they felt weren't loyal enough to their army. You hate them easily enough, and they are given names and personalities. Later on, when they face a common foe, the elites fight alongside the citizen soldiers, and display bravery and loyalty, and end up dying in a battle. All of this turnaround, if you can call it that, occupies probably a couple of pages, spaced seven chapters apart in a 600 page book. And a lot of the characters are like this. Seemingly villainous or virtuous, but all with their flaws and motivations and victims of the world around them. It was as hard as in GotM to know who I'm rooting for amongst these conflicts!
Two books in and it still feels like the stage is being set for something grander. I am not yet bored, even though this story featured a host of new characters and didn't even touch a lot of the favorites from the previous one. In this book, the story expands across another continent, where the setting is closer to the desert planet of Dune. It's again a battle of multiple forces of magic, gods, mortals, immortals each on their own quests clashing, and muddling or aiding each other's plans, with the result always being bloodshed and destruction. The best observation in this series where different gods use mortals as pawns for their battles, was that Hood (the god of death) always wins.
P.S. - Even if you didn't like Gardens of the Moon overall but thought it had good bits, I think Deadhouse Gates should be given a shot before deciding on continuing the series.
The last 100 pages absolutely blew me away.
This is such an interesting world with such cool characters, but the overpowering darkness gets to be a bit much sometimes.