Beyond the Shadows -- 2008 publication (original 2008; edition 2008)

Now that was just silly.

The book felt rushed and crammed of information that was spoon fed by plot devices (read: characters), and not shown by the tale itself.

The parts that weren't rushed were fight descriptions, which unless they're really well done can bore me, and angsty lovey-dovey crap, which bore me unless there's an actual point to them- save for one or two parts that could have been shorter, I didn't think there was much of a point in them.

As it were, I read it like:

"Important stuff happened, important items were recovered, and potentially cool stuff happened, but rather than show you that let me skim over it and instead I'll make long musing rants about love and sex and how sad/happy character is to be not getting it/getting it. Oh, and here's a fight scene."

What was the point of the Wolf telling Kylar how everyone's life would go? I'm fairly sure, given what he is, that he would have been able to see it by himself. Did Weeks not want to write one more chapter to show that same thing?

And what about Uly's great great Talent? Is that leading anywhere or is it for another book?

There's nothing I hate quite so much as characters that don't learn- particularly secret-keeping characters that don't learn after being screwed twenty times for keeping them, that they should not keep those secrets from their apprentices/people who help them.
Youd think after the tenth time they'd just tell them everything, no? How stupid can they be?


Despite that, the fact that there was no decent villain whatsoever, that some things were left unexplained, and that the ending was cliché and I did not really like it one bit (Khali could have been so much more, so much better! She was so lame at the end! Ugh!), I'm giving it two stars instead of one because, in a whole, the trilogy has great ideas and great plot points.
It just... wasn't executed properly to the end, at least, for my own personal taste.

In a whole, I would reread the first and second, but I would get rid of the third. It's just disappointing. ( )

Sadly I thought this series got worse as it went on. Thankfully, this was the final book in the series. There were no real plot twists or surprises to the tale and even when he tried hard to surprise the reader it just came off flat. ( )

First off, I like the book, especially the ending, which had a fantastic premise and extremely well written visuals. Curoch, Iures, and the magical system are unique among anything I've read and quite ingenious. However, there are still some problems, mainly with setup of the world and characters.

Having finished this trilogy, I have to modify my previous reviews' comments about 'why are these characters in this book.' Unfortunately, I can't quite reverse them, however, as you don't find out what the characters roles are until the very end. I suspect I may know the reason. Though the actual world is rich and diverse, with all sorts of different cultures and ways of thinking, the backgrounds of characters are glossed over until well after they've started making major decisions for unknown reasons. In large part, background imagery and explanation comes after tacked on as afterthoughts to kind of patch up why a character acted a certain way, or to establish at the last minute where an important item came from.

The big word that's missing from this series is 'foreshadowing,' and given the title of these books, there's a fair bit of irony in that. I do understand the difference between what an author knows versus what the reader is supposed to know at a particular time, but simply throwing characters and places in without us actually knowing who or what we should care about (aside from GRAR EVIL Vuurdmeisters! Fight them!) makes it really hard to connect. ( )

This is a wonderful book, full of epic suspence. It brings a lot of story threads together in a satisfying way, yet has plenty of surprises and twists and turns. It has wonderful characters that are fully realized and most of them have a great wrap-up for the series.

So why not 5 stars? Like the first two books in the series, this was hovering right about the 4-5 star rating for me the whole way through. If we had half or quarter stars, they would all get 4. something. Book 1 would probably rate in at 4.75 while Book 2 would come in at 4.5. This comes in at 4.25. I rounded down on this rather than up on the first two.

Why? While it was still a great read, it didn't have the same charm as the others. I attribute this to the fact that the best storyline in the series was simply that of Kylar Stern. Book 1 takes us through his childhood and his apprenticeship. It is totally engrossing. Book 2 takes us through his coming to terms with what he is, and trying to be a better person. There is still some of that with this one, but the focus here is more universal. The scales are much bigger. And while that is often a good thing, it makes me nostalgiac for the simpler, darker times of Kylar's early life.

That isn't a negative criticsm. I'm not taking points off because it doesn't have the same story as Book 1. It simply wasn't (to me) quite as engaging. That says more for the rapid hungry pace at which I read Book 1 than anything less than wonderful about Book 3.

But if you like big world epics with awesome magic items, horribly intense monsters, political schemings, wonderful characterizations, and intense subplots, this is definitely a book for you. ( )

Wasn't the grand finale that I was hoping for, but I liked it. Very often, I find myself smitten with the first book of a series only to find that the rest of the books that follow don't live up to it. It's especially true with trilogies, and this one was no exception.

Still, it did a good job of tying up all the loose ends and bringing everything together, even though there were a few story lines I felt went nowhere and on the bigger scheme of things served as nothing more than filler.

Also, there's something I noticed about Brent Week's writing that constantly jolts me out of my reading groove and seriously interrupts any flow the book has going. I mentioned in my review of the last book in this series that he seems to have this tendency to make his characters say or crack jokes at the most random and inappropriate times. Perhaps this might have a lot to do with it, but I also noticed that sometimes the language he uses feels "off". I notice it's usually Weeks' use of modern or juvenile vernacular that does it. Just off the top of my head, nothing kills immersion faster for me than seeing multiple characters use the word "butt" repeatedly, like "staring at her butt", "it was a nice butt", etc. Just a personal pet peeve of mine, when I'm reading fantasy.

I still enjoyed reading this though, and I would recommend the trilogy as a whole to fans of darker fantasy, especially if you like stories about assassins and magic. ( )