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“Everything's too easy.
Lots of people die, and lots of them of course die heroically, but that's nothing new in Feist's world.
Leso Varen just keeps on going on and on, for no apparent reason other than that he's necessary in the end as a plot device. Nakor's final scenes and explanations are incoherent, apparently incomplete, and otherwise badly fleshed out, so as to make me wonder what exactly I was supposed to glean from reading 'his' final thoughts. Too little of the how and why surrounding the 'vessels' was explained compared to the number of casual allusions made.
Pug just keeps on going, even though he's constantly exhausted, while the chronology of the final 2 chapters is murky at best. Where is he getting the energy?
I've seen enough Sympathetic People die by now.
Too many paragraphs consist of "Magnus would in the future become more powerful than his pop&mom combined, but for now, and probably forever, he would implicitly trust daddy." or "miranda loved and trusted her hubby dearly (the implied slight misogyny makes me queasy.), but she was really frustrated/emotional".
The story is interesting, but by the time it's over there are so many holes that I have a very hard time being satisified by the outcomes, even though I really like the universe as a whole. Wherever there are numbers mentioned of the number of people that were involved, there seem to be inconsistencies, either within this one cycle, or between this cycle and the Serpentwar cycle (this book mentions 20-40k people, whereas the SWS mentions 200-400k).
Similarly, the population figures for the Dasati keep switching between millions, tens of millions and billions, and there is no real reason given for why the Dark One would want to not first eat billions of Dasati before continuing onwards to the next world, as he does at the end of this book (Apparently choosing to leave them alive for no apparent reason other than 'haste').
All in all, it struck me as badly redacted, and very intent on thrill-mongering through mentioning big figures. In stead of 2000 Great Ones (Riftwar saga), there apparently only are 400 by the time of this series (Why would there be fewer magicians if there is a bigger pool to draw from?), nobody is able to deduce beforehand whose body Varen might have possessed when he came to Kelewan, etc.
Too many of these kinds of questions remain, although the author seems to think that they've all been answered. Sure, you can play around with literal deus ex scenes, but too much is left unexplained for reasons other than "the gods won't tell you (the reader) everything".”
Foppe wrote this review Thursday, July 23 2009.
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