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brents 's review for:
Deadhouse Gates
by Steven Erikson
Characters you don't care about talking about things you don't care about while traveling to places you don't care about followed by crazy magic or battles. Repeat for 600 hard cover pages.
That's the best way I could sum up this book, and it's the reason it took me two attempts to even finish it. This book is a complete slog for 20 of the 24 chapters. It sneaked it's way to a low 3/5 on the strength of the final 4 chapters. Still I didn't have enough connection to the characters to even make those events have the impact that they should.
That is by and large the biggest problem with this book and series. It's not that it's confusing as in it's hard to tell what is going on. It's that so much context is purposefully concealed from the reader that I find it hard to relate to any of the characters or events. There is crazy epic stuff that happens, but often I know I'm supposed to feel emotional or pained about what I just read, particularly in this book, but often I just don't care.
Honestly, there was really only one group of characters I cared about at all in this book, and that would be the Fiddler, Crokus, Apsalar, Mappo/Icarium bunch. What they were doing was always interesting, but when the pov shifted to a Felisin or especially a Duiker chapter I couldn't have been less interested. The Duiker stuff was some of the most dry stuff I've read in fantasy and it felt like a large majority of the book. It also doesn't help that the dialogue often does not in any way feel like real people talking or having a conversation. I'm ok with characters in fantasy not speaking in modern language since a lot of times that can be just as bad (see Sanderson and Lift), but I also don't buy characters constantly spouting off philosophical mumbo jumbo like it's every day speech. It comes off as a little pretentious, and takes me out of the story.
For that reason this book was definitely a 2/5 for the first 20 out of 24 chapters. It pained me to read most of it, and it felt more like a grind than some sort of entertainment. That being said the conclusion to the book is quite good as the plot lines converge and some reveals are made. Kalam finally ended up doing some really cool stuff after spending way too long doing nothing except traveling and being forever stuck in that boring boat side plot. It was interesting enough to bump it up to a 3, but I wish I wouldn't have had to read 20 other chapters to feel that way first.
Editing this because as I think about it the ending was much better than the rest, but as time has passed the book hasn't gotten better but worse. It really feels like a book that didn't deserve the 1 star bump I gave it so I'm moving it back.
That's the best way I could sum up this book, and it's the reason it took me two attempts to even finish it. This book is a complete slog for 20 of the 24 chapters. It sneaked it's way to a low 3/5 on the strength of the final 4 chapters. Still I didn't have enough connection to the characters to even make those events have the impact that they should.
That is by and large the biggest problem with this book and series. It's not that it's confusing as in it's hard to tell what is going on. It's that so much context is purposefully concealed from the reader that I find it hard to relate to any of the characters or events. There is crazy epic stuff that happens, but often I know I'm supposed to feel emotional or pained about what I just read, particularly in this book, but often I just don't care.
Honestly, there was really only one group of characters I cared about at all in this book, and that would be the Fiddler, Crokus, Apsalar, Mappo/Icarium bunch. What they were doing was always interesting, but when the pov shifted to a Felisin or especially a Duiker chapter I couldn't have been less interested. The Duiker stuff was some of the most dry stuff I've read in fantasy and it felt like a large majority of the book. It also doesn't help that the dialogue often does not in any way feel like real people talking or having a conversation. I'm ok with characters in fantasy not speaking in modern language since a lot of times that can be just as bad (see Sanderson and Lift), but I also don't buy characters constantly spouting off philosophical mumbo jumbo like it's every day speech. It comes off as a little pretentious, and takes me out of the story.
For that reason this book was definitely a 2/5 for the first 20 out of 24 chapters. It pained me to read most of it, and it felt more like a grind than some sort of entertainment. That being said the conclusion to the book is quite good as the plot lines converge and some reveals are made. Kalam finally ended up doing some really cool stuff after spending way too long doing nothing except traveling and being forever stuck in that boring boat side plot. It was interesting enough to bump it up to a 3, but I wish I wouldn't have had to read 20 other chapters to feel that way first.
Editing this because as I think about it the ending was much better than the rest, but as time has passed the book hasn't gotten better but worse. It really feels like a book that didn't deserve the 1 star bump I gave it so I'm moving it back.