nakedsteve's review
3.0
Overall, I think this was pretty pedestrian. If you care to follow along with the "Magic: The Gathering" world known as Ravnica, this is solid. If you're coming to the scene from outside MTG, then I can't see why you'd care.
This story takes place many years after the first book in the Cycle, with a significant number of new characters and locations. Reading the first book first adds some context to what's going on, but not a whole lot. It's certainly not a requirement.
The book's largest problem is in its environment. Ravnica is supposed to be a world entirely covered by city, and has been for thousands of years. Some places become uninhabited from time to time due to environmental or other issues, so there's both maintained locations and ruins, but city is supposed to be the thing.
This book takes place primarily in one of those ruined places. Yet the descriptions given don't really make this clear. The image in my head kept going back to the hills of coastal California (that's where I live), and *not* some kind of ruined and thus wild cityscape. A *lot* more effort really needed to be placed into describing how this world looks, because I clearly didn't get it. I began to wonder if the *author* got it (this is commissioned work with someone else's world-building having already been done).
In any event, this is a reasonable book. It's fiction-for-hire, and clearly shows the disadvantage of that model, but for those who care about this plotline, there's interesting intrigue being laid.
3 of 5 stars.
This story takes place many years after the first book in the Cycle, with a significant number of new characters and locations. Reading the first book first adds some context to what's going on, but not a whole lot. It's certainly not a requirement.
The book's largest problem is in its environment. Ravnica is supposed to be a world entirely covered by city, and has been for thousands of years. Some places become uninhabited from time to time due to environmental or other issues, so there's both maintained locations and ruins, but city is supposed to be the thing.
This book takes place primarily in one of those ruined places. Yet the descriptions given don't really make this clear. The image in my head kept going back to the hills of coastal California (that's where I live), and *not* some kind of ruined and thus wild cityscape. A *lot* more effort really needed to be placed into describing how this world looks, because I clearly didn't get it. I began to wonder if the *author* got it (this is commissioned work with someone else's world-building having already been done).
In any event, this is a reasonable book. It's fiction-for-hire, and clearly shows the disadvantage of that model, but for those who care about this plotline, there's interesting intrigue being laid.
3 of 5 stars.
thebookthedrink's review
3.0
I read this to get familiar with the world of Ravnica and it's lore in order to better DM a D&D campaign I'm running.
The author does a great job of describing the world and gradually over 3 books making the reader more familiar with the 10 guilds that occupy Ravnica.
However he doesn't excel at building story arcs nor describing in prose what is happening in a way that makes the reader feel like they understand everything that is going on.
I ended up reading the whole trilogy, which did help understand the world, but at times it was a bit of a struggle to get through some chapters.
The author does a great job of describing the world and gradually over 3 books making the reader more familiar with the 10 guilds that occupy Ravnica.
However he doesn't excel at building story arcs nor describing in prose what is happening in a way that makes the reader feel like they understand everything that is going on.
I ended up reading the whole trilogy, which did help understand the world, but at times it was a bit of a struggle to get through some chapters.
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