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themanfromdelmonte 's review for:
The Sinister Booksellers of Bath
by Garth Nix
I found this quite difficult to get into. It is a caper, and rather breathless at times, rushing us from one incident to the next.
This is the second plot strand. As the Winter Solstice approaches, Susan’s links to her father (the Winter King) are growing stronger, and she fights the temptation to assume more of his power and leave the mortal realm behind.
Being part Sovereign, which is to say, potentially very powerful, Susan is the target of said wizard’s machinations. There are a variety of kidnap attempts using a hidden lodge of Masons (I wasn’t sure what they got out of all this as they seemed to get killed quite regularly) and animated statues, because the Wizard is/was in league with a talented sculptress.
The characters weren’t very well fleshed out and while the author is adept at working hard (sometimes a little too hard) to build a sense of time and place, I felt that this often distracted from the plot.
Lastly, it all ends in a bit of an anti-climactic rush in the last twenty pages. It doesn’t feel like there will be another instalment in the series so maybe the author just wanted to get it off his plate.
Spoiler
In short, a wizard has a relative, (I’m not sure whether it’s her mother or her daughter, but then I am recovering from a hangover that would cripple an elephant) who has an incurable disease. The wizard has taken her out of the normal flow of time and has bought her isolation with human sacrifice. Now she needs to bring the woman back and cure the disease and for this she needs a much more powerful sacrifice. Enter the MC, Susan, who is the result of a liaison between a mortal woman and a Sovereign.This is the second plot strand. As the Winter Solstice approaches, Susan’s links to her father (the Winter King) are growing stronger, and she fights the temptation to assume more of his power and leave the mortal realm behind.
Being part Sovereign, which is to say, potentially very powerful, Susan is the target of said wizard’s machinations. There are a variety of kidnap attempts using a hidden lodge of Masons (I wasn’t sure what they got out of all this as they seemed to get killed quite regularly) and animated statues, because the Wizard is/was in league with a talented sculptress.
The characters weren’t very well fleshed out and while the author is adept at working hard (sometimes a little too hard) to build a sense of time and place, I felt that this often distracted from the plot.
Lastly, it all ends in a bit of an anti-climactic rush in the last twenty pages. It doesn’t feel like there will be another instalment in the series so maybe the author just wanted to get it off his plate.