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mattlefevers 's review for:
The Conference of the Birds
by Ransom Riggs
I think this is maybe the best book in this series so far, which feels... unusual, for a fifth installment.
All of the Peregrine novels are good, there's no entry in the series I dislike. But the first one pulses with a mystery and atmosphere that it would be impossible to recapture later on, once Jacob (and the reader) are more immersed in this world and it begins to feel more familiar than strange. Since then, what has taken the place of the first book's unsettling wonder has been a mix of adventure and worldbuilding, as Riggs broadens the scope of peculiardom beyond this one house and its denizens, and I hate to say it but some elements of that have been more successful (in my mind) than others. Book Three, in particular, spilled such a barrel of new places and characters and nouns into my lap that twice now I've had to read a synopsis of it before continuing into the next book. (Who made the Panloopticon again? Is Sharon a protagonist or an antagonist? Remind me again what happened to Fiona?)
With the start of this new trilogy, I almost had the opposite issue - Map of Days is in many ways a 're-pilot' (to borrow a term from Community) and spends so many of its pages resetting the game board and moving pieces around that it ended up feeling a little thin on story. The best thing that book had to offer was where it ended, and the glimmering promise that having spent three or four hundred pages watching Riggs set up dominoes would all pay off in the next installment.
It does.
This fifth book hits the ground running from page one, and every new story element cued up in the last two books goes off like a lit fuse. I was never bored, was frequently exhilarated, and a couple of times got to the end of a chapter and had to set it down for a minute and just relish in the twists and turns of what I had read. Loose ends I thought were forgotten become crucial, and the new characters introduced in book four mesh with the older ones without replacing them. (Noor is wonderful.) I think the greatest magic trick this book executes is making the whole series feel like a unified whole again, as if it was always building up to this, which I am almost certain can't have been the case. The hardest thing to do, when reopening a 'new trilogy' after having supposedly ended the narrative, is grafting it onto the old one successfully, and this novel weaves itself so deep into both book four and book three that it somehow makes the new developments seem inevitable.
And the last thirty pages or so... I can't really talk about the ending without spoiling everything, but it is a masterful coda that was cinematic and thrilling in its own right and also has me thrumming with anticipation for the next one.
All of the Peregrine novels are good, there's no entry in the series I dislike. But the first one pulses with a mystery and atmosphere that it would be impossible to recapture later on, once Jacob (and the reader) are more immersed in this world and it begins to feel more familiar than strange. Since then, what has taken the place of the first book's unsettling wonder has been a mix of adventure and worldbuilding, as Riggs broadens the scope of peculiardom beyond this one house and its denizens, and I hate to say it but some elements of that have been more successful (in my mind) than others. Book Three, in particular, spilled such a barrel of new places and characters and nouns into my lap that twice now I've had to read a synopsis of it before continuing into the next book. (Who made the Panloopticon again? Is Sharon a protagonist or an antagonist? Remind me again what happened to Fiona?)
With the start of this new trilogy, I almost had the opposite issue - Map of Days is in many ways a 're-pilot' (to borrow a term from Community) and spends so many of its pages resetting the game board and moving pieces around that it ended up feeling a little thin on story. The best thing that book had to offer was where it ended, and the glimmering promise that having spent three or four hundred pages watching Riggs set up dominoes would all pay off in the next installment.
It does.
This fifth book hits the ground running from page one, and every new story element cued up in the last two books goes off like a lit fuse. I was never bored, was frequently exhilarated, and a couple of times got to the end of a chapter and had to set it down for a minute and just relish in the twists and turns of what I had read. Loose ends I thought were forgotten become crucial, and the new characters introduced in book four mesh with the older ones without replacing them. (Noor is wonderful.) I think the greatest magic trick this book executes is making the whole series feel like a unified whole again, as if it was always building up to this, which I am almost certain can't have been the case. The hardest thing to do, when reopening a 'new trilogy' after having supposedly ended the narrative, is grafting it onto the old one successfully, and this novel weaves itself so deep into both book four and book three that it somehow makes the new developments seem inevitable.
And the last thirty pages or so... I can't really talk about the ending without spoiling everything, but it is a masterful coda that was cinematic and thrilling in its own right and also has me thrumming with anticipation for the next one.