Books 2012: Three Parts Dead
Oct. 19th, 2012 06:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbBooks 2012: 200
200. Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead. Tor, 2012. e-ARC courtesy of the publishers, via NetGalley.
Lads. Lads, this book. THIS BOOK.
I started reading it on a whim last night, due to being unable to sleep. Ten pages in, my impression was weird, intriguing, interesting. A hundred pages after that, I was all but bouncing gleefully on my seat.
Three Parts Dead is Gladstone's debut novel. It doesn't read like a debut. It reads like a book from a writer confident in their skill, with the burnish that comes from practice. Gladstone builds an intriguing world, a second-world fantasy that's both recognisably modern and imaginatively, invigoratingly magical. And does so skillfully, incluing rather than infodumping, revealing the depth of background naturally in service to the story.
And in that world he sets a tricksy and tense and compelling story in the mode of the legal thriller, involving dead gods, necromancy, politics, murder, and power.
All that, however, is as nothing besides the characters. They are excellent characters, strongly-drawn, interesting, complex. Tara Abernathy, recently-employed associate of Elayne Kevarian of the necromantic firm of Kelethres, Albrect and Ao, brought to the city of Alt Coulumb to assist in the resurrection of the dead god Kos Ever-Burning. Abelard, a junior priest in the service of said god who's undergoing a wee bit of a crisis of faith. Cat, an officer in the service of Justice - a dead god resurrected into something much less than the previous living deity - whose communion with the god while she's on duty leaves her with a burning addiction when she's not. Kevarian herself, cold and calculating and fascinating and occasionally strangely principled.
And the Stone Men, and their relationship with the god from which Justice was made. And the way everything builds towards a climax that had me going: "!" and, Did not see that coming.
It works, is what I'm saying. It's the best debut I've read since Above. (And Above was the best I'd read since The Drowning City.) It's fresh and hectic and several different kinds of brilliant, and lads, I want the next one.
Now.
(I also want a hardcopy of this. But even now that I have funding I must be careful with it, and wait for the paperback.)
200. Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead. Tor, 2012. e-ARC courtesy of the publishers, via NetGalley.
Lads. Lads, this book. THIS BOOK.
I started reading it on a whim last night, due to being unable to sleep. Ten pages in, my impression was weird, intriguing, interesting. A hundred pages after that, I was all but bouncing gleefully on my seat.
Three Parts Dead is Gladstone's debut novel. It doesn't read like a debut. It reads like a book from a writer confident in their skill, with the burnish that comes from practice. Gladstone builds an intriguing world, a second-world fantasy that's both recognisably modern and imaginatively, invigoratingly magical. And does so skillfully, incluing rather than infodumping, revealing the depth of background naturally in service to the story.
And in that world he sets a tricksy and tense and compelling story in the mode of the legal thriller, involving dead gods, necromancy, politics, murder, and power.
All that, however, is as nothing besides the characters. They are excellent characters, strongly-drawn, interesting, complex. Tara Abernathy, recently-employed associate of Elayne Kevarian of the necromantic firm of Kelethres, Albrect and Ao, brought to the city of Alt Coulumb to assist in the resurrection of the dead god Kos Ever-Burning. Abelard, a junior priest in the service of said god who's undergoing a wee bit of a crisis of faith. Cat, an officer in the service of Justice - a dead god resurrected into something much less than the previous living deity - whose communion with the god while she's on duty leaves her with a burning addiction when she's not. Kevarian herself, cold and calculating and fascinating and occasionally strangely principled.
And the Stone Men, and their relationship with the god from which Justice was made. And the way everything builds towards a climax that had me going: "!" and, Did not see that coming.
It works, is what I'm saying. It's the best debut I've read since Above. (And Above was the best I'd read since The Drowning City.) It's fresh and hectic and several different kinds of brilliant, and lads, I want the next one.
Now.
(I also want a hardcopy of this. But even now that I have funding I must be careful with it, and wait for the paperback.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-10-19 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-19 08:12 pm (UTC)