Review: Shadow's Edge

I finished Shadow's Edge this week, book 2 of the night angel trilogy.
I thought it was pretty engaging and a huge improvement over the quality of book 1.
A more measured, but still very fast, sense of pacing with better scene transitioning and better dialogue, though its romantic parts still managed to irk me at times. It also has a hugely upscaled and interesting magic system and way more atention to worldbuilding, though that still isn't very great.

Plotwise the story follows on directly from book 1, so much so that I felt that this was part 2 of one big book. Not alot of time is spent reintroducing characters and plotlines so it does feel advisable that the books should be read fairly close together.
I had alot of fun with the progressing storyline and I wasn't as much bothered by some of its more obvious flaws as I was with its predecessor although there were still some moments of ridiculous deus ex machina, not exactly in the big plot points, but just some small elements that that were very visibly incorporated to keep the pace going and which seemed very implausible at the time.

One of the better things is that in alot of scenes I found myself in a pretty much constant state of dread. Somewhere along the way I had started to care for the characters, both the important ones and some of the side characters, and when the writer has a habit of killing them left and right in quite gruesome fashions, you get a little anxious whenever scenes seem to build up to facilitate alot of bloodletting.

I'm not going to say much about the story or the characters because relating anything of the current status quo at the start of book 2 would naturally entail huge spoilers for the climax of book 1. And since these books tie very closely together I'm not going to spoil a thing (and it would also save some time :). I'd say it actually comes close to a Lord of the Rings level of trilogy coherence, so again; it's a good idea to read all three back to back (though not having read book 3 yet I might have to end up eating those words, though it would be surprising).

On a more personal note
The part where a mysterious magical forest where anyone who goes in will never come out alive was very, very interesting. It also really gave me a hankering to finally go and read Mythago Wood.
This also helped: Feeding the forest with Memory

Hyperion AND The Prince of Nothing? Holy shit, I really need to bump this up on my reading list.
 Alas, due to my nature that's easier said than done. It also doesn't help that there isn't a good complete matching set of Holdstock's Ryhope Wood in existence (that isn't out of stock).

Or, you know, Gollancz; I would love to have some new editions to match the 2 fantasy masterworks I have.

Beautiful covers!

Anyway,
I wasn't quite sure if this trilogy would actually be worth my time but I'm starting to warm up to it.
On to Beyond the Shadows.