I have never been more comprehensively got

right. I am going to try to do this without ruining it and I will probably fail so consider this an ok minor spoiler but not really warning, I don't know, scroll past if you have not read it.

so the thing about this book is that it retroactively makes the two before it better, and I did not know a series could do that. things I had marked down as slightly clunky in book one turn out to have been placed there ON PURPOSE, years earlier, and I sat there going back through my ebook highlights at one in the morning finding them. there is a detail about the mists that I had actively complained about in a review I wrote in about 2016 and I was WRONG and the book knew I was wrong before I did.

I need to be honest though because I rate everything high and people give me grief for it. the middle of this one is not as tight as the first book. there is a long stretch of travel and army logistics and I did drift, I listened to some of it at 1.4x while doing the washing up which is not a compliment to a book. and one of the POVs, I am not going to say which, spends a lot of pages arriving at a conclusion the reader got about two hundred pages earlier. that is a real flaw. I am counting it and giving it a ten anyway, which Priyesh says invalidates my entire rating scale, and honestly, fair.

the ending. the ending is the best ending in fantasy and I will fight about it. not because it is shocking, though it is, but because it is EARNED, every single piece of it was in the drawer from the first chapter of book one and he just opens the drawer. that is what I want. I do not just want to be surprised; I want to be surprised and then immediately realise I had no business being surprised at all.

video game comparison incoming because you know I will: it is the Dark Souls thing where you finally see the whole map fold back on itself and realise the shortcut has been ten feet away for forty hours. that click. that exact click.

I cried. properly, embarrassingly, at about two in the morning, in a chair. I am not pretending otherwise. the last time a book did that to me I was nineteen.

and here is the bit I did not expect to write. my nan died in the March I read this and I had been avoiding thinking about it in the very effective way where you read a lot of fantasy instead. and this is a book about a thousand years of people leaving things for people they will never meet, notes and caches and instructions, on the assumption that someone will eventually turn up who needs them. I did not go into it expecting to be handled. I got handled.

ten. read the three of them in order and do not let anyone tell you the second one is skippable.