By
Fernando Clements on Wednesday, May 22, 2019
Download Last First Snow Craft Sequence Book 4 Audible Audio Edition Max Gladstone Troy Duran Tantor Audio Books
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Product details - Audible Audiobook
- Listening Length 12 hours and 44 minutes
- Program Type Audiobook
- Version Unabridged
- Publisher Tantor Audio
- Audible.com Release Date March 26, 2019
- Whispersync for Voice Ready
- Language English, English
- ASIN B07PQZLM7C
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Last First Snow Craft Sequence Book 4 Audible Audio Edition Max Gladstone Troy Duran Tantor Audio Books Reviews
- Last First Snow both is and is not a prequel in the traditional sense. It chronicles the story of some of the main characters of other books in the Craft Sequence before they appear in their own books—though I won’t say who, in case you’ve not read those books yet—but it also has its own completely self-contained story-line which wraps up quite well by the end of the book and while it shapes the history of the later books and their world, it’s not the “How things came to be†story that, say, the Star Wars prequels tried to be.
I think it benefits from this, as well. Gladstone allowed himself a fairly free canvas with his characters and his plot, and while he did have end some of the storylines in particular ways to set-up for the other books, he had a lot more freedom to make the plot match the character decisions and who they really are, instead of the other way around, the trap I feel most prequels fall into.
It feels like I’m repeating myself over and over again when I talk about how interesting Gladstone’s wildly varied cast of characters is, but it always bears repeating. In Last First Snow, we follow a magician/lawyer, an undead skeleton, and a priest of dead gods along with those they are working with, including a man who reminded me of Iron Man every time he was on-screen, two cooks, and an insurance agent. Getting to know this new cast—and the familiar characters at a different point in their lives—was, as always, a pleasure, and something I have come to expect from a Gladstone novel.
The beginning of the novel is incredibly strong, and within the first 30-40 pages we’re introduced to all of the major players in the novel and the main conflict—and at that point, I wanted to root for all of them. The set-up utterly hooked me, and the gray moralities it teased at were fully realized by the end of the book—with elegant shades of subtlety that made me look at old and new characters in quite a different light.
The plot, too, drives itself along quite nicely, and I never found myself bored, and it was difficult to put the book down to make myself dinner. (The nap I accidentally took while reading was due purely to walking 10 miles in Texas summer heat, not the book.) But the book isn’t just driven by its plot, and it combines that plot with a brilliant, powerful ending, which had some truly awesome surprises, and made it one I would love to see on screen some day.
One of the other ways in which Gladstone continues to improve is his prose, and there are a huge number of great descriptions and otherwise highly quotable lines in the book, though I managed to limit myself to only quoting a few of them on Twitter this time.
In summary, Last First Snow by Max Gladstone is a great starting point for the Craft Sequence—or if you already love the previous books, you really have to pick this one up because it is undoubtedly my favorite one so far. The plot moves nicely, the characters are as diverse and interesting as I’ve come to expect from all of Gladstone’s work, and the ending is a truly spectacular showdown that I sadly can’t talk about too much because spoilers, and the book remains intensely quotable. I give it five of five stars, and I’m anxiously awaiting more entries in the sequence.
Review originally from my blog, MentalMegalodon. - I have a hard time even putting into words exactly how special the Craft Sequence series is. It is a wonderful amalgam of Urban Fantasy, Steampunk, and something along the lines of John Grisham's legal thrillers. The internal mythologies and cultures are wonderfully realized (although they are largely just modified versions of existent ancient mystic cultures, they have been adapted to fit this crazy beautiful new setting very well). Imagine a world where gods are real, and human sorcerers are real, and they have gone to war...and the gods mostly lost. The global landscape is broken up between the kingdoms of the super-sorcerers who defeated gods, the few nations in which the gods prevailed (or were never attacked for one reason or another), and the handful that remain independent in some other strange fashion. The currency of the global economy is soulstuff, used to power magic in all of its forms, and the power of mystic entities is traded like a commodity on a stock exchange. Craftsmen and -women are the lawyers of the day, creating and enforcing the contracts between gods, sorcerers, and men. The setting alone is enough to make it worth reading the books. But the setting isn't all you get.
Max Gladstone's prose reminds me in a lot of ways of William Gibson. I wouldn't call it "flowery," but it is beautiful in a poetic sort of way. He finds ways to make you feel viscerally the reality of this very unreal setting, and is a master at describing the minutia of how love and loss and longing affect a person. When his characters ache, you ache. Please, do yourself the favor and give this series a chance. I don't care if you start with this, the first book in the internal chronology, or Three Parts Dead (Craft Sequence Book 1), the first book published in the series. I've heard that both are superior orders, but I can't comment on that. - This is, in my opinion, both the most difficult read in the Craft Sequence and the one that best develops the potential of the setting.
This is set chronologically earlier than the other books of the Sequence. It starts us off with people we have already known as supporting mentors and bosses to the main characters, showing them in younger days that shaped them into the imposing figures they came to be. We already know who will live, who will die, and who will tell their stories (sorry...), but the way Gladstone shapes their stories, that only adds to the drama.
The plot is engaging despite its foregone central conclusion, throwing in new details, wrinkles, and things-the-history-books-won't-tell-you at every turn. The character study is *amazing*; all the comfortable categories of "hero and villain" one might have slotted these people into are upended again and again as pride, ambition, desperation, and bitter grudges cause the best laid plans of gods, sorcerors, and mortals to fall astray again and again.
By the time the classical tragedy has ground to its painful conclusion, everything you think you know about the Craftwork world has changed, and a new, uncomfortable light has been shed on the one we live in...
By
Fernando Clements on Tuesday, May 21, 2019
