The Strength of the Few

There will be spoiler, beware!

Characters

Where do I begin? Given that Vis is now split into multiple worlds you get a slice of his personality in different settings. It was a curious experiment that we don't see often to discover how the environment affects the main character of a story. I was happy to have new players in each world but since you could only focus on so much at a time, it was hard to connect with them as much as you were able to in the first book.

I am very intrigued by Caeror's double motivations across worlds. That will be interesting to see unfold.

Story

It's the first time I read a story like this and I had no doubt it would have been hard to pull off. I appreciate a complex world and storyline and I think James does a really good job at navigating that. I am still thankful for chapter 42 where things are spelled out clearly for anyone to reconcile what is happening. That said, there are one-too-many moments that felt close to Deus Ex Machina to me. The silver arm being one of them. Generally, there's just so much going on that it's hard for him to go deeper and make it make sense. In the first book we were able to explore in much more depth and now that we are split across three worlds it becomes increasingly hard to make the reader care as much.

Writing

Wisps of cooking smoke drift above it into the faint promise of dawn.

He has a much more elaborate writing than I have been used to in more modern books. Even the quote above is delightful and I found many moments like this. The balance between a captivating and complex storyline coupled with beautiful writing is tough.

Rating

The first one set the bar soo high that this could not live up to. I like the series which is why I decided to settle on a 4 even though I think it's closer to a 3.5+