The "Middle" Chapter

I've now finished reading the second book in The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone series, The Charnel Prince. This is the follow up to the good-but-not-great-and-maybe-not-as-good-as-I-remembered-it The Briar King. Book two also wasn't "bad." I'm still committed to continuing the series. But I'm not any more committed to recommending it to others than I was before.

Book two suffers from "middle chapter" syndrome. In any multi-volume story, the middle volume(s) almost always drags. The characters don't move very far along in terms of the plot; pieces get set in place for the coming finale, but you tend to find things not much further along at the end of the story than you were at the beginning.

Here, a lot of disparate plot threads from book one sort of wander around in the hopes of meeting up with one another. They don't really quite do it until the final 50 pages or so. (And even then, not all of them do.) It's debatable how much really "happens" to the characters in the preceding 450 pages. Still, you get the hints of where things are going, and that at least still seems interesting, even if the current plot isn't at times.

There is one new addition to the overall story, however, and it's one of the best elements of the book. A new character, a court composer, is introduced in The Charnel Prince, and a good deal of the story is told from his perspective. He becomes an unlikely hero, gets commissioned to create a grand musical work in a style that has never before been heard, and attracts the ire of the church for his heretical ideas on composition. This character does have a dramatic arc throughout the book, which is greatly appreciated in the midst of other characters that are sort of treading water through this volume.

I'd rate this book a C+. So, as I said, I'm not exactly recommending it at this point. But we'll see where the story goes in the remaining two books...