kgbooklog

Gregory Frost, Lord Tophet
Del Rey (2008) ISBN: 978-0-345-49759-8
Score: 1

Conclusion of the Shadowbridge duology, in which we learn why people are chasing the heroine and what really happened to her parents (making me wonder if the first volume is even necessary). The plot is rather contrived and full of infodumps, but that's not surprising in a story about stories. The last ten pages (excluding the epilogue) consists of the story of the title character, a couple paragraphs of climax, and then a page of ambiguous denouement. Someone who likes short stories would probably like this better than I did.

Next Book: Kai Meyer, The Water Mirror

Gregory Frost, Shadowbridge
Del Rey (2008) ISBN: 978-0-345-49758-1
Score: 2

First half of a high fantasy tale about a young woman following in the footsteps of her father, a famous puppetmaster. It's set on a huge, complicated system of bridges (plus a few islands, but those are mostly ignored by the bridge residents), with each span treated like a separate country with its own culture and language (the latter is irrelevant, since setting foot on a span grants you instant fluency in the local language). I was a bit disappointed at the end when I realized we don't really learn all that much about the world, or the gods that are openly pushing the characters around, or what happened to the heroine's parents. We do see the heroine tell several stories (with and without puppets), including possibly the entire second half of the book (the focus shifts to a young man, and the first line indicates it's a story, but the prose matches the main narration rather than the style used for the other interior stories, and it is far, far longer than they are, with no way to tell where it ends and the narration resumes).

Next Book: Carole Nelson Douglas, Dancing With Werewolves