Monday, September 19, 2016

Review: Midnight Tides

Midnight Tides Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Of the Books of the Fallen so far, this is my favourite. Many folks complain that Erikson starts over with an almost completely-new cast, but I for one think that's a good thing. In the previous books, I felt like he was struggling with characterisation; he had more characters than he actually needed, and some of them were too similar or in too similar circumstances to keep straight. He also wasn't always great at transitions, so every PoV change could take you quite a few pages to figure out who this was and what was going on. I frequently had to look up character names in the fan wiki just to figure out who we were currently talking about.

In this book, by starting with a clean slate, he gets the chance to improve on all that. The characters here are far more distinct, and well-drawn. The settings are drastically different, and Erikson uses them to craft his transitions better. He tells an interesting and more-complete story that is much easier to follow, despite it's twists and turns.

Shame about the end though. Tehol's story - half of the plot of the book, and one of the more interesting characters - is never resolved at all. And the main plot gets reversed - (view spoiler) - at the last minute for no reason whatsoever.



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