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A review by jassmine
Last First Snow by Max Gladstone
3.0
Their house, their son, her arms, were fortress walls against the desert night. Their bed was a sacred and secret space guarded by dark arts from history.
So far, I have problematic relationship with the series (I only read [b:Three Parts Dead|13539191|Three Parts Dead (Craft Sequence, #1)|Max Gladstone|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333049511l/13539191._SY75_.jpg|19101555] apart from this one.). It always takes me a long time to get into the story and even though it in both cases started to come together around the last third of the book and ended in a spectacular bang it left me strangely cold. Overall, I think I prefer Three Parts Dead, but this book had one feature that I enjoyed to a ridiculous amount (this seems to be unpopular opinion), but I loved Temoc's character arc, I'm just going to put this into spoilers even though you already know all of this if you read the books in publication order.
Spoiler
He's amazingly written grey character. He's mostly likeable in the beginning, even though he is the character type that is usually reserved for bad guys - a populist (may be a little too harsh a word) priest. He has some red flags, but he genuinely tries to do good and then he slowly descends... the flip of his character was absolutely believable for me (even though there was one place where it scratched a little bit). And I was there for the whole emotional journey. Even when he's doing some unforgivable things, we see them done through his eyes and so we can understand where he's coming from and just for a moment before we start to really think about what is happening, we might even agree with him. I adored this part of the book.It is easy, fast, to fight and die beside your brothers in the sun. It is harder to build, to teach, to live, and to remember.
Other than that the book fell a little flat for me, there is a lot of interesting characters outlined, but we don't really get to know them which was a shame. Elayne is still amazing, but she isn't Three Parts Dead level badass. The world is still interesting, but even though we are in a new city, there wasn't enough of the new stuff here to keep me entertained.
To be completely clear, I don't think this book is bad by any means, it just... didn't speak to me, I guess... I don't know what happened, we'll see how I like the next one!
BRed at WBTM: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/21764590-last-first-snow-craft-sequence-2---oct-2022