Monday, April 24, 2023

Finishing up

 I had hoped Planar Powers by J. Robert King would finish out the Blood Wars trilogy in a readable style, but sadly, it was not to be. 

Let's start with Aereas. As we found out through the last book, he's now a disembodied spirit working as a Judge-Excecutioner for the Lady of Pain. However, now he has a closet, a cantrip allowing him to shrink people and things. Which he uses to smuggle condemned prisoners out of the torture/execution rooms and create a world as The Closet Lord. 

Nina, on the other hand, is living in Celestia with Phaeton, as well as Aereas's kid Tara and Nina's son Aegis. The Devas aren't happy to have lesser beings among them, so we get a rehash of Milton as everyone gets kicked out of heaven. 

We also have Leonin, last seen standing in the Beastlands waiting on Nina to return, now realizing he's missing his ribs and picking up a hag and passing through the machine realm. (Which includes a parody of a Disney song that actually made me laugh. And we get a side story (a few paragraphs after every chapter) discussing the disposition of the door in Boffo's shop that opens on a Prime Material world. 

While this was the most cohesive of the series, it's also really really deeply...flakey? I mean, the wonder I felt reading the setting is nowhere to be found anywhere in the trilogy. Even the war the trilogy is named after really had nothing to do with much of anything in the series. 

While I'm not sorry about reading it, I don't think it rates a reread any time in the near future.

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