A review by cupiscent
The Road to Bedlam by Mike Shevdon

2.0

Not bad, just not really satisfying at all. I was looking forward to seeing the polish of practice smoothing out some of glitches that marred the first book, but instead they seem to have got worse, and many of the good elements of the first one were not repeated here. This is far less tight that the first one, and where Sixty-one Nails was pretty non-stop and pacey, this spends pages woffling about, as our narrator steps us through moral or mental processes, many of which had been discussed previously anyway. It felt like endlessly churning over the same space, not really moving anything forward. Like a car bogged in the mud.

Separately, both the girls-lost-to-the-sea storyline and the fate-of-his-daughter storyline are fascinating and have some really interesting material - and I can totally see the thematic link in there (I should, he beats us over the head with it explicitly) - but they were never really interwoven in the novel, making it feel more like the seaside story was shoved into the middle to make things longer - and Raffmir popping up at random to Be Portentious didn't help at all. And I was looking forward to some digging into Bedlam and the relationship of insanity to society (especially given the excellent work in the first one with arcane legal ritual and magic), but actually there was just a passing reference.

I am disappoint. Pretty mediocre. Won't be reading further.