A review by yak_attak
Blade of Tyshalle by Matthew Woodring Stover
4.0
Huge, complex, and crumbling under its own weight. Its epic scope is both its strength and its greatest curse - and from two dimensions. First, this is an ugly, disgusting book constantly one-upping itself not only in twists, but how brutally these twists play out. It's not a book I can recommend much: Metaphor for child molestation plays out pretty much non-stop for half of the running time and that's hardly the worst of it.
Second, the more simplistic narrative of Heroes Die steps aside to give Stover room to do a lot of complex meta work...
But the combination is just *hard* to read. Hard to keep track of. Hard to deal with. Coming as a sequel to a book as well-honed as Heroes Die, it's a startling change. At first it's refreshing - the first third of the book is some of the most engaging build-up in a fantasy novel I've read. The action hero is crippled. The villain is... a friend? And the instigating incident that kicks off the main plot is one of the most impressive uses of a world I've seen - Stover is not afraid to stir up the status quo, that's for sure. But the resolution of all these threads, because of their complexity, simply can't match up to the setup. Some of it is exciting. Some of it is amazing. A hell of a lot of it though is a muddy tangle, leaving you feeling like 'huh that's sure important but I don't get how.' And that feeling stays basically from the 2nd half through the conclusion. There's no neat Rube-Goldberg machine that leads to a satisfying conclusion so much as an primal scream of chaos where everything smashes together.
But what a smash it is
Second, the more simplistic narrative of Heroes Die steps aside to give Stover room to do a lot of complex meta work...
But the combination is just *hard* to read. Hard to keep track of. Hard to deal with. Coming as a sequel to a book as well-honed as Heroes Die, it's a startling change. At first it's refreshing - the first third of the book is some of the most engaging build-up in a fantasy novel I've read. The action hero is crippled. The villain is... a friend? And the instigating incident that kicks off the main plot is one of the most impressive uses of a world I've seen - Stover is not afraid to stir up the status quo, that's for sure. But the resolution of all these threads, because of their complexity, simply can't match up to the setup. Some of it is exciting. Some of it is amazing. A hell of a lot of it though is a muddy tangle, leaving you feeling like 'huh that's sure important but I don't get how.' And that feeling stays basically from the 2nd half through the conclusion. There's no neat Rube-Goldberg machine that leads to a satisfying conclusion so much as an primal scream of chaos where everything smashes together.
But what a smash it is