Review: Beyond the Shadows

Well shit, that was pretty awful.
I've thought about distancing myself from my experience and my views on this book and trying to give as objective a (re)view as possible, because in the end every book is an ideal book to someone, and it seems the very height of hubris to dismiss something just because its not in line with my views.
But these are my posts. They're my opinion and as accurately as possible reflect my experience and it's likely that they won't match yours.
So, feel free to discard or even contradict, it doesn't really matter.

Now, where do I even begin?

Maybe with a disclaimer or something;
Now that it's all done, I would've doubtless felt different about it had I known how to apprach it though even then I know I'm obviously not in the right age group to be reading this trilogy.
Though it deals with occasionally dark subject matter there's a disconnect with how maturely it's approached. That, coupled with its characters seeming preoccupation with sex and chastity leads me to believe that the Night Angel trilogy is ideally read by adolescent males below 18 preferably with no past reading experience with any sort of competent writing, fantasy or otherwise.

Yes, from that backstabbing disclaimer you can probably tell I'm more than a little irked.

The more I read of this trilogy, the less I liked it.
Every book took a while to get into but this one, was something else.

Book one was pretty good. A gritty coming-of-age story of a boy-assassin. The childish tone of the story was easily dismissed because of the characters' age, and the plot was, if not inspired or original, at least competent in its execution, its escalating stakes and rapid pace. The square focus on the main character was servicable and it made him relatable.

Book two was the story of several adolescent males coming to grips with their hugely altered lives in the wake of the devastation of book 1. Oh, and their one-note female love interests are also present but serve mostly as plot devices. Several strands of said plot, by the way, get abandoned until they're given lip-service in the final pages, just in time for book 3.
There are some very odd beats and character decisions here, easily explained as the characters are still young and any traumatic fallout from the calamity from book 1 is to be expected but it still takes up over half of the book's plot for these things to be resolved and any actual forward progression  to be made. Half of it was due to the author, undoing the decisions that characters made at the end of book 1.
However, any problems are easily read over and dismissed because of one particular character's interesting storyline (interesting to me at least), a deeper, more engaging magic system, several mysteries and the promise of a spectacular resolution.
This is helped by seemingly better writing, a better sense of pace and less irritating dialogue.
And would you know, that ending delivered on its promise.

And now we come to book 3.

Which is in almost every way a big step down from the previous book.
Everything gets rushed and that bad scene transitioning from book 1 that I mentioned?
It's back with a vengeance. And that's not all.

Though I'm sure that the big plotlines were there all along the story is made up of clichéd and extremely shallow worldbuilding with contrived plot elements coming out of nowhere, without rhyme or reason. It was as if the author just started flinging whatever shit he could find at the wall, seeing what would stick and then deciding to just use it all anyway. What's worse is how these new elements were introduced: Whenever something new is needed to advance plot, character, the magic system or the worldbuilding, then that something will get namedropped in a random conversation bare pages or even sentences before it is needed and then; boom! it's there and without any time to adapt we're supposed to accept it and incorporate it into our existing vision of the world.
It gives the whole thing a semblance of having no actual rules.

Because there's always something new around the corner, as the author re-writes the rules to service his plot, the characters are never in any real harm. And for a book that relies solely on plot, this kind of unreserved bloating can be very damaging. It takes away our trust in the author as a craftsman and turns him into a stage-magician pulling rabbits out of his hat. After a while there's so many different long-ears on display that it becomes quite impressive, until you realize that only the bare minimum of them are actual rabbits, rather than the fluffed up balls of fur that they actually are (I'm saying it's shallow, and that all those impressive names don't actually have anything of substance behind them).
The actual handling of the plot is some of the worst of the trilogy as whole swathes of the story kept getting skipped or revisited to be narrated to the reader after the facts, accompanied by steady but indiscriminate infodumping. Dumped, as I mentioned before, mere scenes before that information would actually start to steer the plot, before being forgotten as something else would be introduced.
A very visible author's hand.

Against all that though, there was one marvelous piece of worldbuilding. a nice bit of sleight of hand that slid right under my nose for most of the trilogy. When it was finally revealed, it actually made like the author's dedication to some of the plot build-up. The element had been there all along but until it was stated black on white, it had completely passed me by.
So, kudos for that one.

I got the feeling that though the quality of the writing had improved, the plot in contrast was very unoriginal and too much time was spent in storylines that were only relevant for its shallow worldbuilding and possibly for a future trilogy rather than actually being crucially relevant to the plotline in this book.

And that ending was disgustingly puerile nonsense.
Hope and true love and magic and everything is perfect in a perfect city.
There was a death that was supposed to make the ending bittersweet but I had stopped caring about this particular character mere pages into book 2 because the character was so over the top saintly and good and best about all that was pure in the world, so that I had hoped for a while that she would just, to god, die already.
So no, the ending did not satisfy and it actually was a big dissappointment.
That, followed by a hackneyed feel-good monologue of what everyone was going to do now that the big bad plot had happened and every last good feeling I had had about the story just evaporated.

The characters were the same immature people this time imbued with a veneer of responsibility.
There's at least one character that has changed radically from someone that that person used to be. The book explained it as a deliberate changing of self but it seemed more a change to suit exposition rather than any actual evolution or growth to the character.
Other characters, but not alot of them; before, seemingly extreemly relevant to the plot get cast aside as soon as convenient and are not revisited.

The antagonists are underdeveloped and constitute the brunt of what I mentioned before about the author seemingly just pulling stuff out of his hat. At times I felt literally inundated with various new magic types of demons, characters and hellbeasts of all sizes. At one point it seemed as if a big moment of pay-off was present at the time of reading, but in hindsight that particular reveal didn't actually end up meaningful.

The fragmentation of the character viewpoints didn't help with keeping me invested. because half of the points of view were boring until the moment something interesting happened. and then the author switched back to another p.o.v. that wasn't as interesting. this repeated again and again and again made for some very slow reading.
I've read other books that used this same technique and they pulled it off.
Just being flippant now, I assume it's down to the characters' unique voice, or here, lack of it.

So in summation; this is yet another time I've fallen victim to the hype train.
Debuts are usually shaky but even then, good authors show promise in their debut and though the quality of Weeks' writing did actually improve (marginally) over the course of the books, there's on a more personal level reasons to not read his work;
The best books are books that work on several levels.
This book and in fact the whole trilogy only works on the one; plot. and that one was simplistic, puerile, rushed and poorly plotted. Add to that boring and occasionally inconsistent characters and this becomes just too much of an uphill struggle. I'm done with this kind of writing and I'm done reading Brent Weeks.

EDIT: Yes of course. not liking this trilogy doesn't make it impossible that I won't like anything else this author has written or will write. But I also doubt that there's going to be such massive jump in writing quality that'll make his future books take their place among the best I will have read. As such, it doesn't seem worth the bother.