About Bloody Time

It seems unbelievable to me, but it's been about three months since I wrote about the latest book I was reading, The Charnel Prince. I haven't been reading a ton since then or anything -- I've been basically stuck in the same book all this time.

So I'll bet you can guess how this review is generally going to go.

Part of my slog through The Blood Knight, book 3 of 4 in The Kingdom of Thorn and Bone, was no fault of the author's. I was reading the book right at the time I was needing to pack and move out of my old apartment. There wasn't as much time to read. But the book was also not interesting enough for me to want to make the time to read it. Of course, that continued even after I was moved and settled in at my new place -- the book just wasn't that interesting for me to want to pick it up again.

But finally I did, and now I'm done. I can at least report that it finally did start to pick up in the back half. But there was a lot of "damage" done in the front half that couldn't really be redeemed.

This book did a lot of treading water in the first half, with characters separated and sort of wandering around just to get to moments of realization that the reader has been suspecting for a while. There's a lot of reiteration of the same major points: "ooo, that guy sure is evil," "ooo, that monster sure is dangerous," and so forth. I suppose when you're reading one book spread out over three months, maybe a little repetition isn't all bad, but it's not exactly a page-turner either.

Finally, in the back half of the novel, things started to pull together. There was at last a couple big showdowns promised for some time, and some significant progress made for a couple of the characters. But I'm feeling there are a couple of ways you could look at the series overall right now, with one book to go, and either way, I think the series is one book too long.

In one sense, there was a whole lot of aimless meandering in books two and three. Perhaps the writer would argue that it was all material pertaining to the "hero's journey," forging our characters into who they must be for the final climax. And I subscribe to that. You have to if you read fantasy, because that's the model most of the time. But I truly don't think it needed to take so long. I think the "good parts," if you will, of books two and three could have been put together with judicious editing, resulting in a tight and exciting single book to sit at the middle of a trilogy.

Or, alternatively, you could look at where things ended up here in the actual book three as written. As I said, there were some pretty big climaxes. It's just that at the end of it all, two major villains both manage to sort of "slip away," each having acquired something that will give them more power with which to challenge the heroes in the final book. Ultimately, neither ending felt quite big enough to have been "the end of the series," but at the same time, it also felt like the way they "just managed to escape" was an unnecessary cheat. Another way you could look at the series would be to say that maybe whatever big things the writer still has in store for the Real Ending, he could have just lifted them to place here, adding maybe another 100 pages or so to this book and building it up for a proper climax.

Either way, this four book series feels like it should have been a three book series.

Am I continuing on, despite the lesson one would hope I got from reading that horrible four book David and Leigh Eddings series? Well, simply, yes. Even though I'd probably be generous to rate this particular book at better than a D, I still feel like the series has the potential for a strong finish.

But I've decided on an interlude, and plan to read one other book next. I hope it will get me more back into the habit of reading regularly. We'll see.