Good Morning Folks! I’ve been working through the Craft Sequence series by Max Gladstone. The problem is I have no clue why I even know this series of books exists. Generally speaking, I can usually pin down a recommendation to a specific friend or group of friends who have been actively reading a given book. For this one however I am at a bit of a loss, but at some point over the last few months I added this to my “Want to Read” queue in Bookwyrm. I love Bookwyrm and for anyone who does not know what that is… it is essentially something akin to Goodreads but that exists as part of the ActivityPub “Fediverse” and federates freely with Mastodon. You could in theory use it as your primary Fediverse account, but I tend to treat it as a separate thing and then boost my activity there to my main account. I wish there was a way to formally link a Bookwyrm account to a Mastodon account, but in spite of that issue, it still works extremely well. I’ve been using it to track my progress with the various books I have read this year.
The Craft Sequence as a whole piqued my interest when I heard it referenced as another “Urban Fantasy” setting. The thing is… this is a wildly different flavor of Urban Fantasy than something like Dresden Files. In the Dresdenverse there is a veil between the true world and the world that the common folks understand, and it is maintained to keep both sides safe. In the Craft Sequence, it is a fully fantasy world that just happens to have evolved to modern levels of civilization. The thing is though… you don’t necessarily get this feeling in full effect until you get past the first book. Reading Three Parts Dead, it feels like you are reading any other fantasy novel save for the fact that it has a lot more modern language. It is a tale of necromancy and gods… and the legal contracts that bind them to their followers and what happens when a god dies. I loved the character of Tara Abernathy… a young associate at the Craft firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao on her very first project for that group. I described the feeling to a friend like “What if Hermione was a Necromancer and got kicked out of Hogwarts”.
The second novel Two Serpents Rise takes place with a completely different set of characters in a different kingdom. This is the point where I realized we were building a universe more than we were going to be getting serialized content focused on a single group of characters. This novel was deeply interesting because it focused more on the ramifications of an event that took place 50 years before the events of these novels. Craft practitioners and the Gods went to war… and the Gods lost. Two Serpents Rise is set in a pseudo-mesoamerican-inspired culture where 50 years ago… human sacrifice and the worship of the gods… were outlawed. There is an older generation that feels like this was not a good idea and as a result, the city has been in a bit of a cold war with the theists ever since. Your primary point of view on this situation is from Caleb Altemoc who works as a Risk Manager for Red King Consolidated and is attempting to make sure that city services are not negatively impacted. I did not think this book was nearly as dynamic as Three Parts Dead, but I still found it enjoyable.
Last night I finished Full Fathom Five, the third book in this sequence and this is the point when the methodology of this series is starting to pay off. Once again we are focused on a completely different setting, this time the Island kingdom of Kavekana. This is a place that lost all of its Gods during the God War and instead figured out how to create pseudo-gods in the form of “Idols” which are used as essentially savings accounts for storing “souls” as part of the banking industry of the magical world. This gives the island significantly more power than they have any right to, which places it on a precarious balance between assorted Military powers… but its Financial clout keeps them from being invaded. Your point of view character is Priestess Kai who works for the group that shapes the idols and worships them in order to imbue them with something resembling life to keep the financial transactions safe and secure. There is however a plot in the works to destabilize the entire system and a few characters that we met in book one and book two as minor side characters shift to the focus in this book.
I have to say so far… Full Fathom Five was my favorite of the Craft Sequence to date. Like I said we are beginning to finally see the payoff from all the work building this world and setting up its political and theistic structures. I think going forward the plots will begin to interweave a bit more as the entire sequence of books is likely leading to some crescendo. This is very much a series of books that has been constructed with a plan and I am exceptionally interested in seeing where that plan is going. I’ve tried not to read up too much on this series but it seems like Chronologically Book Two takes place before the events of Book Three… and then Book 4 is technically the beginning of the series. There are apparently Six books in the main sequence and then two additional books that begin another series that is connected to the first six. I think at this point I am bought in and will be reading through these until I reach the end.
It has been a bit of a wild ride for me when it comes to books and reading. Generally speaking, I tend to only read a few books in a given year, but as of last night, I had completed forty-three and will likely close out the year around forty-five. I’ve had a blast and in part, all of this was prompted by my wife and I finally renewing our Library cards last December in order to take advantage of the easy book checkout process brought on with the LibbyApp. We both have three different library cards connected to that system now each with their own slightly different collections of what we have access to. It does however make me a little frustrated that I did not do this sooner given how much I have thrived while reading all of these books.
Right now I am taking a bit of a break from the Craft Sequence as the second “Viv” book by Travis Baldree was released yesterday. I did not realize this was going to be a prequel and would technically be book zero in this series. Legends and Lattes is probably my favorite book that I read this year, and it was such a cozy and comfortable setting to spend some time in. I fell in love with all of the characters, and so far Bookshops and Bonedust seems every bit as delightful as the first book did. I’ve only put in about a half dozen chapters but I will be burning through this one over the next few days.
What are your favorite books that you have read this year? What series should I check out? Drop me a line below.