Waybound

It’s tough to stick the landing on a long fantasy series. Fantasy writers seem to feel the need to have some sort of epic showdown, where the conflict takes a huge percentage of the book. Wight is no exception here, and it makes this one of the less enjoyable books in the series.

Eighty percent of this book is combat, combat reports, and rushed training scenes. Although those elements make up the meat of this series, usually they are the more boring parts to get through in order to reach the more interesting scenes – resolution and character development, whether dialogue or introspection. Wight makes fascinating, interesting characters look like it is easy, and this is one of the few books where we get no new characters and almost no interesting character growth. It’s particularly disheartening when the previous book felt like a boring amount of setup, so this is two books in a row where it seems like Wight’s doing some chores instead of having fun writing the scenes where he does his best work.

The final resolution itself is fairly well done, saving this book from being a complete slog. Wight wrote a follow-up book with additional scenes about Cradle, and more than a few of those scenes would have been a big improvement as content for this book instead of some of the more drawn out combat sequences we got.

It’s a fine finish to the series, so it gets a 5.