The fifth book in Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence series came out months ago, and I read it immediately, and then put off writing the review so long I felt I had to re-read it to remember everything I wanted to say. And I didn’t mind one bit. See below for a review of Four Roads Cross.
I’ll be honest: this is the book I’ve wanted since Three Parts Dead, the first book in the series. It’s not that I didn’t love the other books, they’re all wonderful. It’s the characters that I wanted.
We see Tara again, the young Craftswoman who (to the horror of the average Craftsperson) decided to work for the local Fire God instead of making piles of money at a cut-throat law firm. (Gods and Craftspeople don’t get along, mostly because Craftspeople slaughtered so many deities in Gods Wars, but Tara and Lord Kos are willing to let that go.)
Abelard, the cleric who (completely unwittingly) saved the life of his God in the first book, is now hailed as a hero and very possibly a saint, when all he’d like to do is crawl in a hole with his engineering and his doubts about whether he ought to be on a first-name basis with a Fire God.
Cat (who we saw in Full Fathom Five) is still working with the police, a job that’s pretty similar to the police in our world except they work for a goddess who covers them on command with a super armor that turns them all into a telepathic link and is mildly addictive.
Her friend Raz, the vampire pirate (I’m not making this up, and he’s absolutely my favorite character) isn’t so sure about the whole armor thing, which he insists on calling a costume.
“It’s not a costume.”
“I’m not up on the preferred nomenclature. What am I supposed to call your creepy addictive hive mind symbiont?”
And in addition to all our old favorites we get new characters and new problems, all based on the fact that Lord Kos almost died a few books ago, and now he’s at risk again because his girlfriend, the newly reborn moon goddess Seril, is also at risk, because rival forces are attacking her children, the stone gargoyles, and if Kos protects her then all the banks and businesses who’ve invested souls with him might decide that’s an undisclosed risk and sue him for fraud, which could destroy the entire city. Or all of reality, if it’s really bad.
“…uncertainty in high-energy magic is, to put it mildly, not good.”
“Not good?”
“Imagine demons pouring out of rifts in reality the size of continents. Cities compressed to one-dimensional points. For starters.”
It’s the most wonderful combination of finance and weird magic that you will ever see. A courtroom case is an apocalyptic event, and talking with a rival investor gets Tara pushed into an alternate realty fire dimension for a fraction of a second because she really pissed him off. But she knew the risks before she talked to him, as she tried to explain to her friend before going in.
…honestly, I know you’ve had a rough few decades, but I wish things like don’t attack the immensely powerful necromancer we’ve come to ask for help could go unsaid.
So there’s amazing amounts of strangeness all over the place that people take for granted, but a lot of the themes in the book are based on problems we see all the time: A woman likes a man who pushes her away. A girl takes care of her broken father while her sister escapes into religion. A graduate wants to do something meaningful with her life while struggling with soul sucking college loans. These are all common themes. But in this case the college loans are literally soul sucking, the sister’s religion is to the goddess who broke her father in the first place, and the man is pushing away the woman because he’s afraid he might chew on her arteries and she might want him to.
Oh, and we’ve heard about dragons here and there in the past four books, but this is the first time we get to see one up close. And I mean really up close. And it’s so matter of fact and perfectly Gladstone in its weirdness that it’s probably my favorite moment in the book.
(On a related note, the way Gladstone describes mid-air battles is almost too realistic, suspiciously so. I’m not saying he’s actually a dragon in disguise, but I’m not NOT saying that either.)
But in the end it’s the wonderful phrasing that makes me love these books. There’s a lovely description about the market place in the evening that depicts it as day and night having sex. There’s descriptions of music where you can practically hear every note, and you get that same chill you get from hearing the best key change ever.
At one point Tara tries to explain how a lot of magic is really a matter of trying to trick reality into behaving the way you want.
In Crafty terms, it’s like sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting really loud to keep the other person from persuading you.
And the sarcastic remarks between characters are the best, like when Shale isn’t comforted when Tara tells him the zombie hoarde that’s been creating problems is really an isolated event.
“It’s just one problem at one site.”
“Yes.”
“So’s a stab wound.”
“I’m not having this conversation with you anymore.”
I could go on and on with my favorite lines, but then this review would be as long as the book. In short, this is my favorite book in the series since Three Parts Dead. And I love the entire series, so that’s saying something. There’s the tiniest part of me that thinks this book may be better than Three Parts Dead, and that’s really saying something.