Roo
Rating: 3 stars
Gardens of the Moon!
Malazan has a reputation, which was certainly a concern of mine when I started this book. It plops you into the world and you either have to sink or swim with the flow of it. I think that that outlook for Malazan is maybe required going in, and I'm glad to experience it early, because I think it adjusts expectations internally to, “either you're okay with this, or you're not”.
I liked the vastness of the world and the sense of scope for the world, the characters feel different and unique to one another, and the prose is something I enjoyed, without a lot of cliche and unevenness that you might expect in a debut book. However there were certain aspects of the book that simply didn't gel quite as much as I would have liked with me. Though the characterisation was there, I didn't gel with the character growth aspects. It sometimes felt like you might get a scene or two before a large characterisation jump occurred, and I'm more a fan of a slower build to that, and there was variation in this. The growth of Crokus for example felt more organic to me than the arc of Sorry, where the latter's main conflict was brought up as a burgeoning plot issue once, and then resolved by a different character in a different scene by what seemed like an unintended side effect of their own actions, which robbed me of some personal satisfaction. To me, this book has a strong theme of powers playing with people they deemed much less grand than them, from the Malaz Empire in its conquering to gods and their pawns, so to not see one of those great examples have agency in their own resolution in that theme kind of galled me.
The plot felt... a little like a prologue, and people will get their own mileage from this. It's multiple plot threads converging, but it doesn't play to the normal rise of tension, complication, climax structure that you see in many books. This led a little bit to feeling like things were uneven somehow, though also, there were plots and perspectives that meant you could entirely see the pieces coming together before Erikson spells them out, if you're paying attention. I'm not sure how much of this feeling was affected by a year break I took reading this book between the first quarter and the rest of it, but in some ways, the book almost stokes within you a desire to immediately reread, to see what you missed the first time.
Lastly, the ending didn't really stick for me, which I feel is potentially an unpopular opinion. The characters we spent most time with were the little guys of the world, caught up in the gears of machinations much larger than them. When all the conflict comes to a head in the final chapters, the plot resolutions doesn't come from those little guys half as much as it does from big power players. And, though we're told all these things are happening that are momentous and climatic and casually killing people and devastating the world, I didn't feel the danger so much, because the battle kept being outsourced (or so it felt) to a similarly powered NPC, rendering the climax muted. Lastly, to a certain extent in this, I truly think Erikson's worldbuilding approach bit him in the ass, because I swear one very important point of the climax was not mentioned until that point, making it feel slightly deus ex machina, as opposed to a well planted foreshadowing. Again, this could be a victim of my break in reading, but it felt a bit like, “well, why should I care?”
Overall, I'm intrigued by it all, enough to try another book or two and solidify my opinion, but I didn't leave GotM feeling wowed. I left feeling like there was a story that I wanted to read about the effects of war and the way people are used as cogs in machinations and the effects it has on them, and that story being left in the margins of great deeds and overshadowed by them. A real pity, I think, considering one of the themes I took from this book where that all the machinations of the world cannot survive the ferocity of a human heart.
Rating: 3 stars
Gardens of the Moon!
Malazan has a reputation, which was certainly a concern of mine when I started this book. It plops you into the world and you either have to sink or swim with the flow of it. I think that that outlook for Malazan is maybe required going in, and I'm glad to experience it early, because I think it adjusts expectations internally to, “either you're okay with this, or you're not”.
I liked the vastness of the world and the sense of scope for the world, the characters feel different and unique to one another, and the prose is something I enjoyed, without a lot of cliche and unevenness that you might expect in a debut book. However there were certain aspects of the book that simply didn't gel quite as much as I would have liked with me. Though the characterisation was there, I didn't gel with the character growth aspects. It sometimes felt like you might get a scene or two before a large characterisation jump occurred, and I'm more a fan of a slower build to that, and there was variation in this. The growth of Crokus for example felt more organic to me than the arc of Sorry, where the latter's main conflict was brought up as a burgeoning plot issue once, and then resolved by a different character in a different scene by what seemed like an unintended side effect of their own actions, which robbed me of some personal satisfaction. To me, this book has a strong theme of powers playing with people they deemed much less grand than them, from the Malaz Empire in its conquering to gods and their pawns, so to not see one of those great examples have agency in their own resolution in that theme kind of galled me.
The plot felt... a little like a prologue, and people will get their own mileage from this. It's multiple plot threads converging, but it doesn't play to the normal rise of tension, complication, climax structure that you see in many books. This led a little bit to feeling like things were uneven somehow, though also, there were plots and perspectives that meant you could entirely see the pieces coming together before Erikson spells them out, if you're paying attention. I'm not sure how much of this feeling was affected by a year break I took reading this book between the first quarter and the rest of it, but in some ways, the book almost stokes within you a desire to immediately reread, to see what you missed the first time.
Lastly, the ending didn't really stick for me, which I feel is potentially an unpopular opinion. The characters we spent most time with were the little guys of the world, caught up in the gears of machinations much larger than them. When all the conflict comes to a head in the final chapters, the plot resolutions doesn't come from those little guys half as much as it does from big power players. And, though we're told all these things are happening that are momentous and climatic and casually killing people and devastating the world, I didn't feel the danger so much, because the battle kept being outsourced (or so it felt) to a similarly powered NPC, rendering the climax muted. Lastly, to a certain extent in this, I truly think Erikson's worldbuilding approach bit him in the ass, because I swear one very important point of the climax was not mentioned until that point, making it feel slightly deus ex machina, as opposed to a well planted foreshadowing. Again, this could be a victim of my break in reading, but it felt a bit like, “well, why should I care?”
Overall, I'm intrigued by it all, enough to try another book or two and solidify my opinion, but I didn't leave GotM feeling wowed. I left feeling like there was a story that I wanted to read about the effects of war and the way people are used as cogs in machinations and the effects it has on them, and that story being left in the margins of great deeds and overshadowed by them. A real pity, I think, considering one of the themes I took from this book where that all the machinations of the world cannot survive the ferocity of a human heart.
