Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A young magician is assigned with her mentor to resurrect what's left of an unexpectedly dead god.

I didn't love this like I was promised, but it's pretty cool. The worldbuilding is by far the highlight. I'm actually kind of bitter about that, because I've had this notion of melding magic with contract law in the back of my mind for a few years, and here it is. Done quite well, at least. This brief note by the author explaining his starting points gets at a lot of what I enjoyed about the worldbuilding – creative, complex, very organic feeling because it resembles one of our major systems of power more than most magic systems do.

But for all that, and the competent, smart heroine . . . eh. This never caught fire for me. I wasn't really pulling for anybody. And I should have been, since this book is full of women relating complexly to each other and striving at a difficult profession.




View all my reviews