This goes up as an all-time favourite. Explaining it to a friend would probably make me look like someone in front of a murder board, jumping around trying to explain my logic and conclusions.

For starters, each book is completely different at a structural level. From a straight up (more-or-less) typical (and disturbing) narrative that fills out the idea and character that is Ambergris the city, an ostensible missionary now steeped in the New York-esk underbelly of the city develops an infatuation with a woman in a store window, and proceeds to lose himself to his feelings completely. Not what you’d expect from a fantasy novel at all, feeling New Weird esk very much.

But then it becomes apparent that it’s just a part of the larger story, which happens many times throughout the trilogy. One section is a guide book to Ambergris with extensive footnotes inserted regarding history, and makes it a very long and literary… thing? There’s a narrative of the exploring of underbelly of the city, in the caverns where the fantasy creatures dwell. There’s a forward, again written in a post modern way with lots of footnotes, only not by the author of the forward and the forward being more of a memoir as it proceeds. A very short story that appears as an interview of a pseudo Vandermeer (self insert?) author, who appears to be suffering from hallucinations of Ambergris in New York. It’s wraps up with a heavily modern noir detective story, again managing to make all the other seemingly disparate threads feel highly relevant and even more interesting, increasing re-readability.

Somehow, the whole thing ties together perfectly and the prose work is absolutely my type: proficient, poetic, high specificity, and, while semi mercurial in its mode of shaping to the various narrators, manages to keep a dark-fantasy noir-esk tone. It ramps up and down but builds into an absolute force at the end. It really is just a stunning and completely captivating bit of work. I already know I’ll re read it some time, and lament having got to it so late. It sat in my shelf for literal years before I picked it up. Don’t be like me~

Perhaps it was the hype, but I was kind of hoping for more from this. The character work was fine but, again, felt a bit too prescriptive in its sentimentality and resolution, for my particular taste. The prose got out of the way, so neither helped or hindered, and the characters didn’t particularly grab me. This was highly readable, though.

This was much more readable than I expected, given that much like Clancy, the author really enjoys the minutiae of the subject matter. If you want to know more about sailing and the navy as an institution, this has you covered. The actual Point of this novel, in the end, elicited a shrug from me. It’s not too prescriptive about it and the character work is above and beyond commercial fiction, which I would wager would be the real source of it being regarded well by so many. It’s what kept me reading. In fact, the actual mutiny and its examination, was pretty much beside the point.

3.5 rounded up

This was solid throughout, and I think I’d have liked it even more if I’d read it closer to publication. The core subject matter around the case is just… dated, played out. But the character work itself was above par, and the prose out-of-the-way. I doubt I’ll keep going with the series, but this was fun enough, for what it is. It delivers all the tropes one would want when looking at the jacket.

Unobtrusive prose work, but otherwise trite in every regard.

The writing here is the star of the show. The voice has specificity and a fantastic sense of pace as it renders the protagonist and the thriller-like pace. It is dark fantasy, so gritty and gruesome. Characters are not safe, success, when and if it comes, arrives only at a steep price. The character(s) can be and often are wrong, with massive consequences ensuing. The world itself didn’t feel entirely novel to me, but the writing style makes it not just readable, but addicting to consume. I had an immense amount of fun with this one and will read the next, for sure.

I really dig Gladstone’s prose work. It’s very noir, the world, though flawed, works well to propel a very fun plot. I don’t jibe completely with the setting, but I find the character work and plot to be far above far for commercial fiction. I really like this series. Probably, if it didn’t have a Dresden-esk wry sense of humour injected into it, I’d have liked it even more. I tend to like seriousness, especially in noir-type prose.but, after trying far more commercial well regarded efforts, this does feel above and beyond those.

I actually liked the characters more than previously, yet the plot a bit less than the last one. But the characters bumped it up from a 3.5 to 4, rather than down. Again, the setting is interesting… and cool, but it continues to not really do all that much for me, despite it feeling unique. I can’t pin it down exactly, but it is clear that I’m mostly reading the series for the characters and absolute readability of the prose.

Also, who did the artwork for this series? Incredible stuff. I hope they were put on retainer after these because it is by far some of the best fantasy covers I’ve ever seen. In any series!

Holy moly, what a ride. A prequel that ties into the second book. The only gripe I had was that it does retread a lot of ground. Something that has to happen with some degree, due to series wanting each to be read stand-alone. But it also made me crave more from the reasoning and motivations of an established character, which it didn’t quite deliver. However the pressure cooker plot and elucidation it does provide still makes this instalment above board.

This manages to edge up from 4.5 to 5.
Manages to combine both one of my favourite protagonist with an introduction to a couple more, who became my favourites. The setting finally coalesces for me as to something a bit more than a neat idea. aspects of it that felt opaque become alive and vivid (sometimes literally, heh), in this one. And the plot is epic while retaining the excellent above par readability in the prose I like very much from Gladstone.