2020 fantasy, final volume of its trilogy. There's a huge,
world-shaking event going on… but is intervening even the right thing
to do?
Gosh. All is revealed, and there's a lot of it, both in terms of
the characters and their motivations and in terms of the fundamental
cosmology of this multiverse setting. I'm really glad that Schwartz
didn't feel a need to use one of the standard simple cosmologies, and
wasn't afraid of potentially confusing her readers, because what's
actually going on turns out to be a fascinating puzzle in itself, as
well as a motive for "we have to go here and do the thing".
And a strong secondary motive here is: you are a sorcerer, one of the
most powerful beings across the universe. If you get known as
favouring a particular faction, everyone will assume you're always
ready to agree with them, even their own leaders. So in order to
maintain any freedom of action you just can't do that. Even when both
you and they agree on what the right thing to do is…
If you want last-minute problems and hair's-breadth escapes, you won't
find them here; Kira and her team are extremely powerful and protected
against most things their opposition might try to do to them. This
book is much more about the ethical uses of power: when, where and
how. Which is not at all what I expected from a self-pubbed space
fantasy with sexy elves.