She was only a passing student of golemetrics, which required more dealing with demons than she liked. Not that Elayne had anything against demons per se – but her conversations with them often reminded her of a vicious joke in which she herself might well be the punchline. Perhaps the demons felt the same.
It’s hard to describe Max Goldberg’s book Last First Snow and really do it justice. I’ve said before that in his Craft Sequence books the whole economy is run on pieces of souls, so magicians have to be really good accountants, and that makes it sound so boring. In realty the world he’s created keeps getting weirder and more disturbing (in a good way) with each book. Yes it has lawyers and banks and insurance plans, but the lawyers practice black magic, the banks can process pieces of your soul through an ATM, and the insurance plans cover zombie apocalypse damages, so don’t be worried when I say this book centers around a real estate deal; it’s a really weird real estate deal.
Imagine a big city; Chicago or New York or any large, crowed city you like. Imagine that it has an area that’s pretty poor and run-down, with not many decent jobs. Imagine that it has a system of pipes for fire hydrants and sprinkler systems, but they were built a long time ago, and the company that built them isn’t around anymore, so they haven’t been upgraded or maintained in about forty years; while a fire hasn’t come around yet to destroy the place, it’s only a matter of time before one does.
Now imagine that a couple powerful businessmen want to do some improvements. They want to build the place up, put in better systems, brighter buildings, bigger infrastructure. They want to tear down the old and build up the new, and while they’re going to make a pretty penny on it, they’ll also bring in some jobs, make things safer, prettier, better.
Of course, the people who live there aren’t so keen on it. Yes, it’s old, and poor, and run-down, but it’s theirs. Their homes are there, and their families and friends, and they know that promised jobs tend to disappear, and rent in newer buildings is more expensive, as is commuting to work if they have to move someplace else. They don’t want things to change, or if they do change, they want a say in it.
Got all that? Good.
Now instead of it being fire hydrants and sprinkler systems, it’s actually magical wards and spells that were set in place centuries ago to protect the city. And instead of being built by a big company, they were put in place by gods and their priests, and the gods were mostly killed out forty years ago in the God Wars. And instead of protecting from fire, they protect the area from plague, famine, terrorism, demonic possession, and zombie revolutions. And fires. And since nobody’s making human sacrifices or working in the blood vats anymore, the wards and spells are due to fail any time now.
Oh, and one of the powerful businessmen who wants to buy the place is an animated skeleton who’s one of the most powerful sorcerers in the area and runs the rest of the city. Just so you know.
Now you have the setup for Last First Snow, which is equal parts magic, urban planning, divine intervention, and business deals that literally sell people’s souls.
I admit I was worried when I found out that one of the main characters was Temoc: he was introduced in Two Serpents Rise, and I never liked him. He’s a powerful priest, a mountain of a man, and a self-righteous twit. As soon as he appeared in this book I was prepared to dislike him immediately.
But we find out a lot more about him. We get a really good look into what makes him so hell-bent on his private vendetta, and what’s behind some of his more questionable choices. I’m not sure I ended up liking him any better, but I think he’s a lot more interesting now. It really makes me want to go back and reread Two Serpents Rise, my least-favorite book in the series: knowing what I know now, I think I’ll like it a lot better.
The other main character is Elayne Kevarian, who we met in Three Parts Dead, but didn’t get to know very well; she was simply an all-powerful, cutthroat lawyer/sorcerer. Hearing her internal monologue in this book was fascinating, and made her seem both more human and really, really scary.
Elayne briefly considered gutting the man, and decided against it. In her experience spraying a Court hallway with blood and other humors was rarely a good idea. That one time in Iskar had been a special case.
The details that Gladstone weaves into the books are the best part: debt-zombies, golem librarians, alchemical toilets, floating skyscrapers; none of these are talked about in detail, they’re just mentioned in passing, adding a little more detail here and there to the world that you just have to take for granted.
The weapons of war are part of those details. This book had some wonderful, terrifying elements that were used for crowd control, and one of them delighted me and shocked the hell out of me at the same time.
Gladstone is very good at that: in every one of his previous books there’s been at least one moment where I either went “oh wow, I never suspected that was going on” or “holy cow that’s so cool.” In this book both of those things happen, and each of them literally took my breath away.
While some parts of the book started to feel a little slow, they were always rescued by a clever bit of dialog, or a new tidbit of otherworldly information, or some jaw-dropping event that you didn’t see coming. I never had time to be bored.
I’d mentioned in my review of Full Fathom Five that Gladstone has figured the Craft Sequence books would probably run into “the low teens.” I’m thrilled. Tune into this website at the same time, next year, and I’ll review the next one. He keeps raising the bar on these books, and I’m counting down the days until the next one.