Yes, I finally finished ONE of the novels I mentioned reading back at the end of December.
That novel was "Lies Weeping" the 10th (? Feels like more than that have been written) novel in the "Black Company" series.
My short review: this is the weakest entry in the series to date. I still enjoyed reading it, but yeah: dead last place in the Chronicles for me.
Somewhat longer review comments:
- The dual Annalist chapters kept things breezy between the ponderous Shivetya info-dump chapters.
- If Cook didn't tell me which Voroshk girl was narrating, it would be hard to tell, though.
- Using "boob-monster" as the way to let us know that we were listening to Shukrat talk about Arkana is not the way to establish this. The constant mention of one character's breast size is cringe-inducing, creepy, and just reeks of "old man writes teen girl characters" all at once. These are the Chronicles of the Black Company, not the Files of Epstein Island, right? RIGHT?
- This was at best half of a novel stretched out to fill 371 pages. I was having so much fun just being back "in" the world of the Black Company that I didn't mind...much.
- The ending itself is completely unforgivable, with the last sentence depicting one of our protagonists literally about to attack one of the main antagonists...but not even carrying out that attack. Cook expects his readers to wait a full year to essentially see how a punch that's just been thrown ends up landing.
- I will say that since I did not read "Port of Shadows," which was apparently released previous to this book, and found myself not feeling very lost at all, that this book did a decent job of making this lapsed reader feel more or less at home.
- If this were somehow to be anyone's first exposure to the Black Company series, I strongly doubt that they'd bother reading any further.
Better luck next November, I guess!
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