You can go home again, but it sucks
Oct. 3rd, 2023 03:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileSometime when I wasn’t looking, another Craft book came out. This one is called Dead Country and it promises to be the beginning of the Craft Wars series. It’s a lot shorter than Ruin of Angels, clocking in at just under 250 pages. Therefore, I was able to devour the entire thing in less than one weekend.
After the big, planes-spanning drama of Ruin of Angels, this one seemed–at least at first–much more limited in scope. We’re back with our series-starting protagonist Tara Abernathy, now going home to the desert farming community of Edgemont to attend her father’s funeral. Tara had never particularly fit in well in this rinky-dink village on the edge of the Badlands, even before they chased her out of town with pitchforks for witchcraft, and it doesn’t get any less uncomfortable when she shows back up in her fancy suit with her body covered in glyphs.
Tara’s plan to get in, attend the funeral, and get out is foiled by an attack from the Raiders, whose black magic curse is somehow different than it used to be–threaded through with some sort of white fibrous substance that seems to lend it extra vitality and malevolence. Tara ends up staying to help save Edgemont and take down the Raiders; to do so she has to communicate with the other people in the town in order to build wards that define and protect the town as understood by its inhabitants. There’s all kinds of heartwarming character growth and also some sick-ass wizard battles. And behind it all is the threat of bigger, even more fucked-up things than the old God Wards–big spidery things among the stars, and the possibility of the creation of a god born of Craft. It’s definitely a setup to the bigger arc that I assume the Craft Wars series will follow, and it’s definitely an engaging one! I will for sure be reading Wicked Problems when it releases in April.
After the big, planes-spanning drama of Ruin of Angels, this one seemed–at least at first–much more limited in scope. We’re back with our series-starting protagonist Tara Abernathy, now going home to the desert farming community of Edgemont to attend her father’s funeral. Tara had never particularly fit in well in this rinky-dink village on the edge of the Badlands, even before they chased her out of town with pitchforks for witchcraft, and it doesn’t get any less uncomfortable when she shows back up in her fancy suit with her body covered in glyphs.
Tara’s plan to get in, attend the funeral, and get out is foiled by an attack from the Raiders, whose black magic curse is somehow different than it used to be–threaded through with some sort of white fibrous substance that seems to lend it extra vitality and malevolence. Tara ends up staying to help save Edgemont and take down the Raiders; to do so she has to communicate with the other people in the town in order to build wards that define and protect the town as understood by its inhabitants. There’s all kinds of heartwarming character growth and also some sick-ass wizard battles. And behind it all is the threat of bigger, even more fucked-up things than the old God Wards–big spidery things among the stars, and the possibility of the creation of a god born of Craft. It’s definitely a setup to the bigger arc that I assume the Craft Wars series will follow, and it’s definitely an engaging one! I will for sure be reading Wicked Problems when it releases in April.