Fourteen volumes is an unreasonable thing to ask of anyone.
I am asking anyway.
Rated five of six meals.Five meals · Supper can wait
Reviewed by the Editor · 782 pp. · Read in eleven days · Second time through
The first hundred pages are a village, a festival, and
some very bad news arriving on horseback. The remaining thirteen
thousand are what happens when nobody in that village is allowed to go
home again. It is a great deal of book, and I want to be honest about
the cost before I recommend it.
What the length buys you is weather. Not the metaphorical
kind — actual seasons, actual roads, actual distances that take actual
weeks. Most epics compress travel because travel is boring. This one
refuses, and the refusal is the whole trick: by the time the world
turns dangerous you have walked enough of it to mind.
The famous complaints are all true. There is a stretch in
the middle where the plot sits down for a rest and does not get up for
two volumes. Characters tug at their own braids often enough that you
could set a clock by it. If either of those will end you, this is not
your series and no amount of arguing from me will change that.
But the ending pays. Not in the tidy way — in the way
where a thing planted in the second chapter comes due four thousand
pages later and you have to put the book down and go stand outside for
a minute.
Barely a plot for two hundred pages, and I did not care once. The castle
is the character; everyone inside it is furniture with opinions. Read it
slowly or not at all — hurrying is the only way to fail this book.
Short, quiet, and it rearranged the inside of my head for a week. Go in
knowing nothing. I have kept this notice deliberately useless for that
reason, and I'd do it again.
Two hundred pages that most doorstops would spend two thousand on. A
boy is clever, the cleverness costs him, and the rest of the book is the
bill arriving. Nothing wasted anywhere in it.
An unwanted heir inherits, and is decent about it, and decency turns out
to be the hardest thing in the room. Almost no swords. Enormous amounts
of tension about seating arrangements.
Rated three of six meals, provisionally.Three meals, provisional
Third attempt, furthest yet. The narrator is lying and the prose is
gorgeous and I cannot tell which of those is the obstacle. Notice will be
revised if I ever finish.
This paper does not rate what it hasn't finished. It does keep a list,
with the page number and the reason, because that's often more useful to
you than a star would be.