A Dance of Cloaks

David Dalglish admits to idolizing George R.R. Martin in the afterword, and it's pretty obvious when you see how very mean he is to his characters. Honestly, this book was pretty heavy on the rape, torture, and murder for me and not really my cuppa. Still there are a couple of things I really enjoyed.

Firstly, I liked the variety of female archetypes. Most of the female characters were a little flat, but they still ran the good-evil and weak-strong gambit, which is nice. It's nice to have a fantasy book with so many female characters. The Faceless Women were some of my favorites, and I was disappointed that this book didn't go more into depth with them and that two of them died so suddenly in the middle. Is Veldaria going to fulfill her vow? You vowed, Veldaria. While we're at it, Kayla's death was pretty damn anti-climactic too.

I liked the lack of “good” people in the book too. There's lots of people you like, but who still do pretty awful things just to save their own skin or buy someone else a bit of time or even just distracting others. Nobody, with the exception of Delysia and her Gran, is really a decent human being. That's the Martin tribute the book gets right. The fourteen year old "king" is another nice touch. I wasn't expecting it, and I wish he'd gotten a bit more screen time.

On the negative side, I think the book was overly ambitious. There's a lot of plot lines in not a lot of pages, and some of them go no where. The magic system isn't given enough attention to be credible. Characters treat it as so normal and lots of people have “a little magic,” but the rules of the system are never established, and that bugs me. I love a good theology based magic system, but the Karak and Asshur dynamic is give so little attention and the archetypes are so clearly “Bad God/Good God” that I found it a bit of a cheat.

Then there's Aaron. His transformation should have been what kept me interested, but I had a hard time believing it. Kayla saving him seems to be the turning point, but with a kid so groomed for violence... maybe it's the teacher in me who sees kids from much less awful positions never able to fully escape the trauma induced by their early lives, but I just... don't buy it. If Thren was grooming a monster able to murder his own brother at age eight, a monster he would have groomed.

I guess my overall impression was “okay.” I'm not sure I'll continue the series, but if I do I hope it delves a bit more into some of the characters who got the short end of the stick and a little less into the politics.

Despite the fairly high page count (around 450 pages, depending on the version), it was actually a very quick read. And that, unfortunately, is about all I can say in favor of this book. I mean, it seems like the sort of book I would love - waring thief guilds, characters trying to outwit each other, a lot of action sequences. And yet this book fell completely flat for me. All of the characters just sort of felt like tropes, without anything personal or endearing to recommend them. I'm all in favor of character-heavy stories, but I think too many important characters were introduced too soon - you didn't have enough time to get to know them before you had to meet (though in this book it might be more appropriate to say “meat”) someone else. You sort of had to assign the characters to tropes to keep it all straight. The sad thing was that they never really broke away from those classifications.

Another issue I had with this story is that the ploty-ness of the characters didn't really feel organic. Too many characters just flat out telling you too much about their plots. The reader sort of knew what was going to happen at all times, and sort of knew if the plan was going to work of fail right away. There was no time to really have that “oncoming train-wreck” feeling that sort of forces you to have an empathetic connection to a character. Although things didn't always go according to plan, I don't think there was any point in the book where I felt truly surprised.

I also wasn't a fan of all of the violence in the book. I mean, let's be honest - there tends to be a lot of violence in fantasy and science fiction. Death lends itself well to epic-ness. And most of the time it doesn't really bother me, but for some reason in this book it did. I think, perhaps, because I didn't feel anything while reading about it? Normally when reading about tragic events happening to a beloved character it creates some sort of emotional response, but I had none of that in this book. It made reading about their terrible situations feel rather awkward and uncomfortable. The fighting and resulting body count seemed to be just a bit over the top - everything was just a bit too obviously a pissing match to see which character was the most badass. Everyone being so incredibly skilled and having a near-infinite supply of daggers didn't lend much credence to the fight scenes either.

Even the resolution of the story was dissatisfying. I understand that this is part of a trilogy, but the end of the first book didn't have much of an ending, with a lot of plot points unresolved, and a lot of characters lacking a follow-up after the climax of the story. Granted, the lack of point of view can be a very effective way to achieve a cliff hanger, but I don't think it was used to full effect here. I wasn't really concerned about any of the characters, the story just seemed to end because the night was over and everyone was heading back to their hidey-holes.

So, yeah, I wasn't a fan of this book. Which is too bad because it came highly recommended and I was excited to read it at first. It had the makings of a good fantasy story, but nothing really felt fully flushed out. Fantasy books tend to be long for a reason - you need a lot of details to create a believable world with believable characters and interesting plot. This book lacked lacked the details, and thus lacked the interest for me. The one thing I will say is that in reading this book and being readily able to pick out its flaws, it made it much more evident what is required to make a good fantasy novel actually work. Obviously, I am not going to give this novel a high recommendation, as I really don't think got enough enjoyment to justify the time spent on it. However, I do think it could be useful for aspiring writers to read it - juxtaposing it with something like A Song of Ice and Fire can be extremely informative as to why and how long epic stories work. Hint: having a complicated plot, badass characters, and shiny weapons isn't it.

3.5 out of 5 stars from me (I rounded up this time).

This was a really fun and fast read. I loved all of the female characters in this story, which is why I rounded up. The faceless, a group of religious female assassins (hard to explain, but believe me, they are badass), were probably my favorite part of this novel. And Kayla was just awesome. She dies at the end, which is one of the reasons I decided not to go on with the series =/

I mainly took off points because of all of the violence–there was just so much death and almost all of the problems were resolved with bloodshed. Plus, I just felt like the book needed a tighter focus. The plot was kind of all over the place because there are a lot of characters and subplots and power players within the novel–it just need, IDK a better outline. Some of the character deaths seemed to have been added as a way to kill off characters before the big showdown during the Kensgold.

Overall, an entertaining story–very different from the novels I usually pick up. Recommend to people who like assassins and just want to read a book with a bunch of well-written fight scenes.