Dan

My mum's favourite now mine. I don't know how to describe it because it is so amazingly good. Some of the English used is out of date now and some words people might not know as they are not used now.
Anne forever.

The storylines here don't really gel at all, it feels like two novellas awkwardly pushed together, a feeling only intensified by the cheap and easy way one of them is resolved. There are dangling characters and motivations, hints at setups that don't go anywhere....King's afterword suggests this one was a difficult experience for him, and sadly you can see that on the page. Even in his late period he can still write a good book (I really liked Billy Summers), but this isn't one of them. I wouldn't mind at all if Holly had a rest for a couple of books now.

I mean, I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy this, but all the way through it invited comparison with Tom Holt's The Walled Orchard (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1125846.The_Walled_Orchard?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_14). The subject matter (classical Athenian drama and the fallout from Athens' invasion of Syracuse) and the tone (broadly comic but not afraid to delve into the horrors of war and man's cruelty to man) are nigh on identical, and so, much as I liked it, the ghost of Holt* haunted my reading of this.

Also, to put on my classical pedant's hat for a moment, there is one absolute clunker in here early on, when a character refers to Sophocles' Oedipus Rex - rex of course being a Latin word that no Greek** would have used in the 5th century BCE. A contemporary would be much more likely to have called it Oedipus Tyrannos. Or even just Oedipus, as there are suggestions that the Tyrannos part of the title was a retrospective addition once Sophocles had written Oedipus At Colonus, which happened after the events of this book, but that is a pedantry too far even for me.

*he's not dead, as far as I am aware

**yeah, I know

Nicely written but way too pleased with itself

These books are a fantasy companion to Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series, in that they relatively lowkey (although the stakes do get raised in this one) and the villains are largely kept offstage in favour of spending time with likeable characters who are -shock - nice to each other. These characters are mostly all wounded one way or another and the books have a melancholy air, but they don’t dwell on this darkness. Instead they focus on the importance of consolation and the bonds of friendship (even if Thara is terrible at recognising these latter). Ultimately they speak to what we can be instead of what we so often are, which is needed more than ever these days.