There's a structural shift in the three Tentir books: they're very much a trilogy, but almost switching genres to incorporate more of the school story, and as a unity, they feel like the middle movement of a sequence.

I buy that; they are very episodic novels, with somewhat arbitrary starts and stops. I've kind of been thinking of them as one novel in installments, I just haven't liked it as much.

And Tori is given far to little to do with his POV sections here.

Tori needs an entire goddamn book to himself by this point. He's been shortchanged since he spent the entire plot hallucinating in Seeker's Mask.

So I'm hoping that after this transitional bridge, things will pick up.

Fingers crossed. The strangeness of Hodgell's world is one of its great beauties—there is really nothing like Rathillien (or the Chain of Creation) even in later fantasy, and I want to see it done right.