Book Reviews by Eitan

I received an ARC of this book from Tor in exchange for an honest review. When the first book in " A Chorus of Dragons, " The Ruin of Kings , was released, somehow a mere three years ago (!), it received considerable hype and media coverage, which I think it is fair to say it didn't completely live up to. Now the fifth and final book, The Discord of Gods, is coming out to much less fanfare, despite being a stronger and more assured entry and a fitting conclusion to a satisfyingly dense epic fantasy series. Never say the world is fair, right? A capstone book like this, which delivers the final thousand pages in a five-thousand page epic, is not for everyone, and in particular does not step far outside the bounds of what the series has already delivered. To be fair, there's not much the series hasn't tried to do yet. All four previous entries feature multiple points of view, extensive flashbacks (sometimes to millennia before the main events of the book), footnotes...

For once, I'm reviewing something I did not get an ARC of, but Last Exit has spent enough time in my head over the past month that I felt compelled to make a written record of my thoughts. This post will contain vague discussions of other books as well as Last Exit , but no explicit spoilers for anything beyond what you might get from a back cover. My immediate thoughts on the book were almost entirely about vibes--it's a dark, heavy, atmospheric book, the color of the sky before a storm, with that flavor of looming rain. It lives almost entirely in the same space as the beginning of The Tyrant Baru Cormorant : a horrible mix of doubt about all the right things and certainty about all the wrong ones, a space beyond hope because everything you've tried has gone wrong. The prose reflects this painful environment, often literally making feelings flesh with intense physical detail, descriptions of bones and muscle and skin and wounds. Last Exit 's characters all bear scars...

I received an ARC of this book from Tor in exchange for an honest review. It's taken me a while to sit down and write this review, because it felt challenging to do justice to this book. Arthurian retellings are a dime a dozen, and I went in expecting something quick and forgettable. Instead I was delighted to find that despite the small page count, this was a book that rewarded slow, careful examination; after reading the author's note at the end, I had to go back and look at the details, the word choice, and a world that emerges slowly, like a landscape hidden behind a fog bank. Griffith has not so much retold the Arthur story we all know as approached it from the side, telling a parallel story that dances in and out of the parts of the myth we know. Her characters are beautifully drawn--I especially liked Llanza, her take on Lancelot, whose tangled relationship with Arthur and Guinevere is given a new and more positive look. Equally at home describing afternoons spent in qui...