The Way of the Rose

3 and a half stars. third book of the trilogy called Everien, this whole set is an unusual fantasy, written under a pseudonym (presumably to distinguish it from her powerful sf genre work) by the writer Tricia Sullivan. the trilogy seems to have been written as one book, and then chopped into three roughly equal parts for publication, so that the finales of the first two books, arbitrarily set, are not written as such, which does not, let's say, encourage the reader to persevere. and the trilogy subject matter, time paradoxes, are not exactly a common theme in fantasy. as a result, reading the series can be confusing, and the fact that the landscape, the characters, and the plot are continually changing under the weight of chaotic time show more as it is engineered by a host of forces does not make it an easy read. Glen Cook's Black Company and Steven Erikson's Malazan books are the only books i can think of that have used time as a chaotic force in similar ways, and neither of them have made it the central conceit.

i would not say the trilogy necessarily works right through, because it is not always coherent, and it needs to be read as a single whole. but i advise persevering just the same. for one thing it is interesting as a minor sidelight to Sullivan's major standalone sf works, all of which are important. for another it features some interesting and well differentiated female characters, acted on by two male characters over time who are really archetypes, because they are portrayed as the inverse of one another. thirdly, there's a lot that's pretty original along the way: a primitive clan culture, a decadent empire, an upstart interim king, a sentient bird culture specializing in communications, and a secret alien cult, all trying to seize power by co-opting an advanced but long-dead civilization that tried to codify magic. what with the chaos, all these elements begin to intersect, and as they act, destabilize the world, which becomes stratified into strips of land belonging to different times and places, which can only be traversed by a kind of bone magic. show less

This is one weird book. I need to re-read it as I didn't understand everything in the first read. It's an interesting world and magic, but somewhat complicated.