2014 urban fantasy, self-published, sixth of its series. A mysterious
Something comes to Singapore Three and makes its home in a
largely-disused temple. And the Emperors of Heaven and Hell have both
gone missing…
The thing that one gradually notices here is that there is no
villain: there are people (using the term loosely, as always) working
towards incompatible goals, but this time nobody's setting out to
rule, or destroy, the world. Of course, something like that might just
happen anyway, because things have gone very wrong and everything we
know could become collateral damage. It's an escalation of the stakes,
but it feels well-integrated, even as the books' setting expands very
substantially.
"I am a universe."
Over the last few years, Jhai had become accustomed to sentient
geography, admittedly not quite as large as this. She decided to
come straight to the point. "Our universe, or someone else's?"
By the time matters are wrapped up, we've looked into the future and
into other worlds, and visited a pocket universe spun off by a
12th-century minor noble who just wanted to be left alone to get on
with her studies. It's an ensemble piece as before, and indeed the
rapid viewpoint shifts of the last few books come back here, but
perhaps because this is mostly about the long-term characters of the
series I found it easier to keep them straight and maintain a sense of
tension from one appearance of a character to the next. It's also good
to see Chen and Zhu Irzh working together, at least some of the time,
rather than separately driving their own stories as they've tended to
do lately.
It was not, however, as though she was summoning some random entity.
She'd never literally conjured up a boyfriend before, but there was
a first time for everything.
While options are left open for possible future books, there's a sense
of completion here: Chen's child is born, Zhu Irzh gets married, and
everything is Basically All Right by the end. If, as seems likely,
this is the conclusion to the series, it's a satisfying one.
Also, there's a decent amount of badger this time. #BadgerRepresent
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.