Tuesday, March 7, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Dead Country by Max Gladstone

 


Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on March 7, 2023 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

Dead Country is the latest book in Max Gladstone's "Craft Sequence" series and the first book in his "Craft Wars" trilogy that is meant to conclude his work in the series. The Craft Sequence, one of my favorite series over the last few years, features a fantasy world where magic is based upon law and economics, with gods essentially being corporations - so for example, the main character Craftspeople, who use law, logical arguments, and economic principles to do what is essentially magic: so for example, if a god is a being whose power comes from offerings and beliefs of its worshippers and who can die if it expend too much of that power such that it has none left, well in that case resurrecting that god is essentially not just necromancy, but bankruptcy. I'm making this sound drier than it actualy is, with Gladstone combining the concepts in such a way that its always fascinating and makes sense, featuring really great characters (often queer and people of color), and some very serious themes that are dealt with in ways that are usually very fun. It's been a really balanced series six books in, and the wait for this new book over the last few years has been long, even if Gladstone has written some good stuff in the interim outside the series.

Dead Country is an interesting return to the series. The book is very short, the shortest in the series by far, and is basically a fantasy Western using Craft concepts and loses a good amount of the fun and humor that colored some of the earlier books. At the same time, the story still works really well, as it features one of the series' old protagonists, Tara Abernathy (a main protagonist in Three Parts Dead and Four Roads Cross and a minor character in The Ruin of Angels), as she goes home to the town that cast her out with torches and pitchforks upon the death of her father....only to find a young orphaned woman there with a natural gift for the Craft, and raiders touched by a Craft-related Curse making more and more incursions on the town. The result is a story that works generally well, except for a final act reveal really, and deals touchingly with themes of home and what it means to a person, as well as the value of people among prejudice and systems, over the course of its plot. It really works for the most part even if the tone of the book is kind of different.

NOTE: The Blurb for this book advertises Dead Country as the first of a trilogy concluding the Craft Sequence and also as "the perfect entry point to this incomparable world." I would disagree - this book relies heavily on knowledge of the prior Craft works, particularly Three Parts Dead and Four Roads Cross, where our protagonist was introduced and to a lesser extent Ruin of Angels (also featuring her). Readers who go into this book blind are likely going to be very confused and missing some of the important character background that I had, which made things have such impact here in this book. So I would not recommend starting the series here, and this review is based upon the reader having some foreknowledge of the series.


---------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------
Tara Abernathy had established a life for herself as in-house Craftswoman to the God and Goddess of Alt Coulumb. She had friends, allies, and support there....and oh yeah, a big problem: the beings coming from beyond to consume the world. She didn't think much about where she came from all those years ago, to the Badlands town of Edgemont near the Crack in the World which once chased her out with torches and pitchforks.

And then she received mail from her mother, informer her that her father had died. And so, heartbroken, Tara embarks on her own back to Edgemont, to look back on the one she loved that she has lost, who she left behind without a word.

But when Tara arrives in the badlands, everything goes wrong at once, and not in ways she expected. Raiders, infected by a curse left behind from Craft used in the God Wars, are strangely more active and powerful, and had destroyed a small outpost outside of town...an outpost where Tara finds a lone young woman named Dawn as the last survivor. But Dawn is not just a mere survivor, but a girl naturally gifted in the Craft, and Tara finds herself doing the unthinkable - trying to teach Dawn how to control her power before she destroys herself and everything around her.

It's a task that should be beyond Tara's capabilities in normal times, and here in Edgemont, with people who are afraid of the craft and willing to chase her out of town because of it, it should be impossible. But with the raiders coming in force for Edgemont and all the people Tara left behind, Tara will be forced to not only train Dawn, but to reorient herself as a leader within the town, or else her father's sacrifice will have been for naught, and Tara's guilt will be without end....to say nothing of her life....
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dead Country takes a couple of familiar setups and puts a few craft spins on it. There's the Western setup - the Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven setup, where an outsider comes to a town besieged by dangerous outsiders and despite mistrust and enmity, manages to organize them into a defense that saves the day. There's the unlikely mentor of magician setup, where a person whose training went poorly and dangerously has to train a young neophyte in how to use their power on their own, with that young neophyte making potentially dangerous mistakes even as the mentor tries to teach them better than they were taught. And then there's the setup of the unwilling return to one's homeland, where a person who escaped from a hometown that wouldn't accept her is forced back by circumstance to confront the demons of her past and what really matters to them as their own home. There's a lot of familiar concepts here, but Gladstone plays with them really interestingly, with great help from Tara's excellent character and the setup of the Craft.

Tara remains an absolute star, even here where she's given far more to handle in terms of carrying the story than ever before - we never leave her perspective throughout this entire book and no other characters ever jump into the protagonist role at times, unlike many other Craft books.  Burdened already with the knowledge of monsters from beyond coming to end the world if they aren't stopped, a task that seems impossible without Tara taking monstrous steps of her own, Tara finds herself instead returning to the place she was driven out of in Edgemont, where the villagers all fear and hate her for simply being who she is - and her own power.  Years ago, Tara might've taken that as a reason to make her trip back home simple and quick - go mourn her beloved father, for whom she feels tremendous guilt at not being there to save his life, and then leave - but now, after what happened to her at the Hidden Schools and after spending years in Alt Coulumb and elsewhere gaining friends and learning to care for others, Tara isn't simply able to abandon these people once she sees the monsters knocking on their door.  Even more so when her father sacrificed himself to save these people.  And so Tara finds herself struggling to save a people who fear and distrust what she is, which is even more difficult because the Craft isn't some random magic, but a power based upon understanding who people are and taking advantage of their faith and coordination.  

Meanwhile, Tara also finds herself struggling with finding herself as a mentor to Dawn, a young woman with natural gifts with the Craft but no one to support her or teach her otherwise.  Tara sees a lot of herself in Dawn, as a person cast out with nowhere to go, and Tara knows that if she doesn't train Dawn, Dawn will wind up dead as a victim of her own power.  And yet, the only methods Tara knows of teaching the Craft are the dark ones once used on her at the Hidden Schools, where her professor exploited her and other students, treated them like tools and manipulated them, and left them either an empty shell or utterly devastated and on the run - even her healthier mentor from earlier in the Craft Sequence (Elaine) used and manipulated Tara in the course of her mentorship.  And so Tara is utterly terrified of doing the same thing to Dawn as a matter of not knowing how else to train her....and is desperate to find a way to teach Dawn to be better than Tara herself is.  This of course isn't made better by Dawn, having had only bad experiences with others who fear her power, finding it hard to care about or find worth in the Edgemont villagers who hate and fear the Craft and its users...something Tara is trying to teach her otherwise about.  

These character arcs, as well as others involved here - there's a romance between Tara and a local villager she grew up with who isn't prejudiced or afraid that works very well as well - combine to form a plot that is short but works excellently in pace, momentum, and themes.  Tara tries her hardest, but she still isn't perfect and will screw things up, and the conflict that results is excellently done from beginning to end (mostly).  And the plot and character arcs really work well in hitting themes of what truly "Home" is - and how much of one's past Home can one truly leave behind - and (like other craft books) the power of identifying one's self and others, and the danger of creating legal and economic systems (in this case, magical such systems) that can obtain a life of their own and can swallow and strangle everything within it, even without meaning to.  There's a lot of good stuff here explicitly and metaphorically and Gladstone's writing is excellent at teasing it out. 

That said, the book has a few knocks on it here, largely stemming from how short it is I think.  First off, the book relies on one reveal in its final act - with a character referenced a few times here but not explicitly part of this book (but being from prior books in the series) suddenly being a huge part of events in what feels like a very random coincidence that wasn't set up very well.  There's also a final act twist that is foreshadowed, but feels so abrupt to truly work for me, and that twist is gonna be a major part in the rest of this series.  Finally, one of the plot arcs features the book avoiding the typical way that trope plays out for most of the book - to my great satisfaction - before indeed taking that typical plot turn in the end, which isn't a bad thing, but it just disappointed me a little since I hoped we'd go in a different direction.  Not really a bad mark there, just a personal annoyance. 

However, despite that last paragraph, Dead Country is very very well written, and works really well with its characters and themes once you accept those reveals/twists for what they are.  I am excited to see how the trilogy continues and the Craft Sequence ends.  


Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)