Reviews tagging 'Confinement'

Le pacte de la voleuse by Ari Marmell

1 review

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adventurous dark emotional tense medium-paced
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I read this book in 7 hours, 6 of which were technically at work. I couldn't put it down. This book is just really, really good.

Widdershins is amazing and I love her. For the main story of the book she's a thief, but the book also tells the story of her childhood, her rise to nobility and subsequent fall, and how she ended up where she is today. Widdershins is an absolutely fantastic thief and she can escape from literally anywhere, and I adore stories with characters who always outsmart their enemies and leave them dumbfounded. She's been through so much and she suffers so much in this book and she's so brave and so skilled and so impulsive. I love her and I know there's more books in this series but she deserves a happy ending and to not be put in so much danger and emotional pain ever again. It's funny because she never really has a strong motivation through the whole book (beyond "survive and protect the people I care about from this shit that's targeting me for some reason"), but the book around her was so good and she moved through it with such skill that I couldn't help loving her anyway.

Of course, me being so interested in religions elevated the gods aspect of this book to amazing new heights. Not only does Widdershins have her own personal god, gods are a huge important thing in this society - families and industries have their own patron deity, worship brings tangible benefits and protection, these deities could be scientifically verified as real (if anyone were to bother doing so). It also raises some really interesting philosophical questions about the nature of gods (do they shape their worshipers or do their worshipers shape them? Or both? Why does a god need worshipers, anyway?) Widdershins's personal god Olgun doesn't ever speak, but he can still communicate through feelings and for a deity, he had remarkably human feelings.

I feel like anything I say about the plot is going to be a spoiler, because it is delightfully complicated. Someone is clearly targeting Widdershins through the whole book, but it's unclear who and the main villain doesn't reveal themself until the very end (and you won't guess who it is, I promise). There are so many different factions forming a tangled web of devious plans and murder around Widdershins and each new bit of information that unties one bit reveals three more knots. And then somehow it wraps up completely by the end. It was tense, delightful, and so full of people coming very very close to screwing each other over while they're all trying to get at Widdershins, who keeps escaping from everybody's clutches. I loved it.

My only real problem with this book is that there are so. many. characters. Between thieves and assassins and guards and nobles and priests and gods and people from Widdershins's present and her past, sometimes a name would come up and I would have a moment of "who the heck is this?" A couple times I didn't end up recalling the name and just muddled through in confusion, and I'm sure I missed some details due to that.

With how much I adored this book, it may be a strange conclusion to end with the fact that I'm not sure if I want to read the sequel. When I said all the tangled plots wrapped up completely by the end, I meant it. There are zero remaining threads to pick up and run with for a sequel, and from reading the back cover of book two it sounds like it's a completely new adventure with very little connection to this one. I have no idea if it's good or not, and I'm open to reading it in the future. But at the moment, it's low on my priority list because the ending of this book was completely satisfying.
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