Vallista, by Steven Brust

Review copy provided by Tor Books. Additionally, the author has shown by his behavior that despite what I’ve said in previous review disclaimers about his books, he is absolutely no friend of mine.

However, quite often people who have made me sad, angry, and/or disgusted with their behavior write books that are too dreadfully written to bother to read, and this is not the case with Vallista. This is another entry in the Vlad Taltos series, and like the others it is not doing exactly the same things as its predecessors. It is expanding the universe of the series, it is messing with everything that has gone before and recasting it. It is definitely not an episodic “like this one, but more of it” entry in its series, and the trap-building nature of the vallista comes satisfyingly into play.

What was less satisfying for me this time around, and this may well come into reviewing the author rather than the book as I am trying not to do: everyone has tolerance limits on the First Person Asshole voice. It’s no surprise that a substantial portion of a Vlad Taltos novel is written in First Person Asshole. Some people’s tolerance is about a page and a half, some infinite; mine is, at this point fifteen books into the series, fraying. (I would also like it a lot if someone would write a study of how FPA voice shifts in a long series so that it always feels contemporary and therefore includes very mild contemporary phrasing that’s almost but not quite invisible and ends up being the prose tic version of a long mystery series looking like it only spans two years and yet starting with the protagonist using pay phones and ending in them using smart phones. Someone who is not me should do that using several authors as reference. Thanks.) But Vallista also has, for very good plot-related spoilerific reasons, forays into other prose voices than that, which made it a lot easier to read just when some of the “look at me I’m clever” bits of narrative voice were not feeling quite as clever as hoped and had repeated the not-clever multiple times just to make sure you had a chance to not-laugh at it again. I liked…hard to describe for spoiler reasons…pieces of other prose voice, and the reasons why they were there.

There is quite a lot of Devera in this book. If you’re here for serious forward momentum on ongoing plot arc and for Devera: here you go, this is the one you’re looking for. Relationships among other characters in the series, a great deal less so, but there’s a great deal of “can’t have everything” going around in the world, inevitable that some of it would end up here.