Wicked Problems is the second book in Max Gladstone's Craft Wars trilogy, a trilogy meant to conclude Gladstone's Craft Sequence (so really this is book 8). The first book in the trilogy - Dead Country - was a really quiet book for the series, featuring a Seven Samurai/Magnificient Seven-esque setup with a Western-esque town facing off against monstrous Craft-warped invaders and only suriving thanks to the help of series heroine Tara Abernathy, Craftswoman, and her newfound apprentice Dawn....before things go awry between them (spoilers after the jump). It was a very emotion and character driven book, limited to this single setting.
Wicked Problems is still character driven at its best, but the book has expanded to focus on the entire Craft Sequence world and is basically a Superhero/Supervillain team-up (think: the Avengers) for the entire series. Tara and Dawn - now on seemingly opposite sides - are joined by almost every major named characters from the original six books, and honestly, the result is kind of a mess, with so many character motivations and developments that it and any themes involved getting far more muddled than they ever have before in the prior seven books. Gladstone makes it work as well as he could, and his writing remains propulsive and highly enjoyable especially in its quirks and dialogue, but this is a surprising miss, and not the greatest sign for a second book in a concluding trilogy.
Plot Summary:
Tara Abernathy knows she's made a mistake of possibly world-ending proportions. Her student, Dawn, has merged with a self-aware entity of pure craft and the two of them, both tortured and mistreated by other humans, now clearly seek to change the world for what they think is the better...in what way, Tara can't imagine. And then there's the threat of the monsters coming from the stars, a threat that Tara knows Dawn is also concerned with, and which will require an unimaginable type of power to defeat...if their defeat is even possible. To find and stop Dawn and to save the world from the oncoming threat, Tara is forced to call for help from an eccentric but extremely talented group of allies: allies with their own relations to Craftwork and Gods, their own views and abilities, whose views might provide answers to the problem. But deep down, Tara still can't be driven by anything other than the idea that this is all her fault.
But Tara isn't the only one gathering allies. As Dawn seeks out new power in order to reshape the world...or really just make sense of it, she too finds herself coming across others who have fought to make a better world and failed and who are otherwise adrift without a cause to fight for. These others are uniquely gifted in their own rights, and Dawn swears that she and the power she's merged with, which she sees as a Serpent she calls Sybil, will protect those others...whom she grows to care for. But finding the power necessary to stop the coming enemy will require seeking dangerous forbidden and ancient powers, and may require Dawn to make sacrifices she absolutely doesn't want....
But the enemy isn't just out in the stars, as some unknown force is rising in the world itself, consolidating power and taking steps to ensure that no other powers - like those Dawn and Tara seek - remain which can stop them....
My plot summary for Wicked Problems focuses upon Tara and Dawn, but the book, unlike its predecessor, is a lot more spread out than that. Early on, our chapters focus upon either Tara or Dawn's perspectives, but soon after that, the book expands as each character - especially Tara - picks up more old allies for the story. So by the midpoint of the story, you have plot arcs featuring Tara and Kai in one location, Caleb and Abelard in another, Dawn and her team in another, Jax in a fourth location doing something (gonna admit I'm very confused what happens with Jax, who disappears for large stretches and then makes occasional cameos). Each team's actions gets seen from multiple points of view, so you see some actions from Tara's, some from Kai's, some from Caleb's, etc. etc. you get the point, and of course the duos do occasionally get split further. And many of these characters really do get their own character developments as well, so it's not just them having the POV for its own sake.
That's a lot of character names I've mentioned above, and if you've read the Craft Sequence, you'll recognize them from across the first 5 (or 6) books. And this is a theme of Wicked Problems: this book feels to a fault at times like it's having its characters run into and collect prominent named characters from the original Craft Sequence, like its a superhero/supervillain team-up comic (Dawn even references that she's building a team of villains at one point). If there's a prominent named character from books 1-5? Odds are they will show up here, and at a certain point I was just guessing when and where the next character would show up (there's basically maybe one protagonist from the first five books who doesn't make an appearance.)
And like, listen, I really love this series and I like these characters. I've reread a bunch of the books a good amount (really only book 1 have I not reread, but it does get some serious reference here). So I get the joy in seeing these characters team up on various teams and the references to past plot arcs. And yet....it honestly feels like too much, like it swamps some of the ideas Gladstone wants to tell and the character arc's of Tara struggling still with her insecurity and guilt or Dawn struggling to stay human and care about others while becoming the massive system-driven force that can save the world. It doesn't help that Gladstone throws in a romantic plot arc between Kai and Tara that honestly felt completely off to me: there was no romantic interest between them in their last on page meeting in Ruin of Angels and here the two have latent feelings for each other from the start and it's like "what, where did this come from?"
Again listen, none of this makes Wicked Problems a bad book. There are still interesting themes, even if far far more muddled than in some of the earlier books, and the dialogue and characters are still an awful lot of fun to follow. The climactic scene gets kind of confusing to follow honestly (some of this is my own struggles as a reader to be fair) but there's a lot of cool fun uses of how the Craft works as a force based upon law and economics to solve conflicts and to power the magic in this world that's really fun to read. Seeing how each of the major characters uses their own skills to resolve conflicts is again, very enjoyable! And it's largely very entertaining throughout - one joke about a tool Tara carries in her bag still cracks me up just thinking about it.
So I'll be back for the conclusion, and I think anyone who has enjoyed the Craft Sequence should still read Wicked Problems...just be aware it's probably Gladstone's most self-indulgent work to its detriment.
No comments:
Post a Comment