Various Thoughts

The fourth House War book picks up right from the point Jewel left the narrative of the Sun Sword series. And if you haven’t read that series you will definitely end up lost here.

It and the fifth book are pretty similar in style to the better of those novels so there’s not really much to complain about with either aside from the ever-stronger parallels to the author‘s Elantra franchise. I’ve never really understood why authors will write multiple ongoing stories concurrently since they will almost inevitably bleed into one another.

Oracle being a good example. This is where things start to seriously diverge from the Sun Sword narrative and become ever more Elantran, with a heavy metaphysical focus. The other key difference with this book is that Jewel gets shunted into a tertiary role while Jester and Finch take center stage.

Once again, if the foreword is to be believed, the series finale was split into two books. The first, Firstborn, is a bait & switch. The cover and synopsis give the impression the focus will be on Carver/Ellerson, but it’s not. They have about as much page time as Jewel did in the previous entry. Instead it primarily concerns itself with Jewel’s mostly pointless metaphysical travels. Frankly, both Carver’s situation and this book in general both come across as filler. There’s not much to justify either’s existence.

With that out of the way the action finally reaches its climax in War. I can see what they were going for here, but there are so many points of view to jump between that instead of building tension it just builds exasperation. If this were to be made into a live action series you would have to do a 5-way split screen to properly ramp things up, and that’s just not possible to do (at the length this requires) in text format. That said, the end result certainly isn’t as disappointing as Sun Sword‘s; aside from the catalyst for Jewel’s decision events conclude fairly well.

Michelle Sagara‘s House War series starts off both reminiscent of and extremely different than her Elantra series.

The first book (The Hidden City), though it certainly doesn’t shy away from dark/explicit topics or events, in general tells the uplifting story of someone building something for themselves after having lost almost everything. You can see hints of Elantra‘s Kaylin and Severn in the two protagonists and a bit of similarity in the layout of the cities, but for the most part the world and characters created here stand on their own. What really sets it apart from that series though is that it never gets bogged down in metaphysics or abstracts.

City of Night follows it in much the same way The Empire Strikes Back followed its prequel… which is to say that it tears down much of what Hidden City built up. This is a very dark book centered on both despair and necessary sacrifice. While it ends on what could be considered an optimistic note, the actual path traveled to get there is littered with loss.

The third then decides to strike a mood balanced between the two previous entries. Again we have a tale focused on building a new life from the ashes of an old one, but one interspersed with quite a bit of frustration and some trauma (although it’s mostly side characters facing the trauma here rather than the central group). Ultimately I think it wraps things up too well. Too conveniently. While I’m glad to not have a repeat of Elantra‘s re-occurring etiquette and social class subplots, having everyone fit in so well strains credibility.

It will be interesting to see both how this will get to where it needs to get to match its prophesized events and how well it ends up integrating with the author’s earlier Sun Sword series.