Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a friend.
The world is on fire, so I did not successfully hold off reading Max’s book about how the world is on fire until closer to its release date. Also, I’m not sorry.
Okay, look, middle books in trilogies are the traditional place for the wheels to come off, right? Everything has been set up in the first book with Tara’s apprentice Dawn making some god-level dubious choices with the Craft, and now’s the time for all the pieces on the board to scatter into chaotic woe, that’s how trilogies work. But this isn’t just a trilogy, it’s also the culmination of the Craft books from before the trilogy, so when we say all the pieces on the board—
The gang really is all here, friends. Is there a major character you’re missing from one of the previous Craft books? Because Max has dropped them in the shit here. Basically all of them. Many of the fires are literal, people die (gosh that’s inconvenient and hard on their clothes), and the conviction that you and your team are saving the world…doesn’t actually guarantee that the world will get more saved by the stuff you get yourself into.
Because wicked problems are not just “problems! wicked!” They’re the ones with no stopping point, the ones that are complex to the point of insolubility. They’re the ones where attempts at solution reveal more problems. And all of that, absolutely all of it, comes up here, as literal apocalypse bears down on gods, priests, lawyers, family, friends, and whoever else they can rope into helping. Or hindering, or…if they can even tell the difference.
Seriously don’t start here, but if you think you might be excited about all this? Yeah. You’re excited. Because this book just does not let up.