June 5, 2025: 4/5 stars

Most of my friends that read this after reading the original trilogy say that they're disappointed by it. And while I do prefer the original trilogy so far, I'm not disappointed by this book at all.

The coolest part about it is seeing this world and how it grew (and even what remained the same) after an era of relative peace. The sci-fi lover in me also appreciated seeing how they were able to build technology around and with the magic, in ways that they couldn't or that were suppressed in the times of the final empire. And it was cool seeing the events in the first series treated as history, mythology and new religions here.

So far it does feel significantly lower-stakes than the first series, which I think is what could make it feel disappointing to some. For example, it's hard to feel too invested in a story where some lives are at stake after coming from a story where the fate of the whole world was at stake.

But maybe it would feel like too much to come from one set of world-ending events straight into a new set of world-ending events. Events of that scale need time to build, so maybe we need the foundation of the relatively peaceful world that was built by Harmony first to truly understand the impact of larger-scale events to come.

March 26, 2015: 4/5 stars