2011 fantasy, last of its trilogy. The Shadowborn are attacking, and
even if Lightborn and Darkborn work together that may not be enough to
stop them…
If volume 2 was a little short on action, this final volume has
plenty; but it suffers from some of that book's other problems,
particularly a narrative that's split among rather too many
characters. Each of them has an interesting story, but it's always a
wrench to move between them.
Of course, a series that's about puzzles and mysteries has to provide
satisfying resolutions to those puzzles and mysteries. It's a bit of a
mixed bag: the huge threat of Shadowborn monsters from the Borders
turns out to be rather smaller in scope than expected (and I suppose a
whole new society might have been a bit too much to add in a final
book), but we do get to learn the actual history of how the
Lightborn/Darkborn split happened.
The Shadowborn themselves always felt narratively superfluous to me.
We already have these two parallel societies with different
worldviews, and each with multiple factions; to my mind we didn't need
the whole Shadowborn angle to provide both poking-stick to get things
moving and huge magical knowledge from which the solution can be
constructed (which, because it's basically "this magic you didn't know
about exists and is useful", feels like a cheat because it isn't
foreshadowed). There are already lots of fascinating stories to be
told here without the huge external threat to make people work
together (when they finally believe in it). The core motivation of the
Shadowborn, when it's eventually revealed, just doesn't satisfy at
all; collectively they are bare-bones plot drivers among a
constellation of more interesting people.
The characters we've met before go on well, and the core couple of
Balthasar and Telmaine remains interesting and convincing, even if I
sometimes felt that Sinclair was enjoying piling hurt after hurt on
Balthasar just a little too much. Some of the new characters are a bit
prone to fall in love at first sight, perhaps because there are only
so many chapters left and they have to share the narrative.
The first book is definitely the best of these, but if I wasn't wowed
by the others I did at least enjoy them.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.