The Stone of Aer

What to say about our third outing into The Shattering of Kingdoms? Well, in short, this book took me a bloody age to get through the first 75%. I was really struggling to finish it, all the while loading a scattergun of scathing to fire off for this review. But then came the last 25% and forced me to slide the safety back on with some brilliantly entertaining prose. Emmet Moss, you are not making it easy to review your novels.

So we re-join our heroes and heroines immediately following the events of the last book, with our varying characters now weaving in and out of each other’s overall arcs. My trouble with the first 75% of the book is simple: there are certain characters whose storylines don’t grip me most of the time, and when those storylines account for half of the book, it makes getting through said book more of an arduous slog intermittently peppered with rays of sunshine as opposed to a truly great read/listen. Now I know that a lot of people won’t agree with me. By having so many varied character perspectives and storylines going on, Moss tried to ensure that this series has a bit of something for everyone, which it absolutely does. However, in doing so I am reminded of the old adage ‘jack of all trades, master of none’. Instead of sticking with the most gripping storylines, Moss gives equal time to all of them, even when some of those storylines take an eternity for anything interesting to occur. Now again, some of my less favoured storylines may be the favourites for other people, and that’s why I think this book will have a wide general appeal. It’s well-written, the language is good, and the characters (if you like them) can be engaging and have depth. But in trying to hit all the bases you lose out on that one key factor that I always swing back to in my reviews, the one thing that can pump even a mediocrely written book up to throw down with the heavyweights. And that factor is… pacing. By the gods some of the sections of this book are slow, and when you have multiple slow storylines all coinciding, you’re just left with a slovenly soup that you know you have to gulp down in order to get to your pudding. However, there does come a point when no amount of gourmet ganache is worth guzzling down a gallon of gloopy gruel, and this book nearly reached that point of abandonment for me.

Again, I’m not saying that this book isn’t good in the technical sense. All the elements are there and Moss’s skill as a writer is clear and well deserved. It’s just the manner in which he places all of his components together could be done more strategically. You have lots of coinciding storylines. Great. However, having the long build-ups for all of them occurring at the same time so that you’re hit with a flood of awesome at the end may sound good in theory, but in practice it leaves you with a significant dead zone right in the heart of your book that becomes tiresome to traverse. The ending was awesome. Truly. I went from having to force myself to listen to the book to being unable to put it down, but why could we not have had some of that awesomeness spread out through the entire novel? Enough at least to keep that fire he intermittently lights under or arses from snuffing out. I’ve said it for the first two books and I’ll say it again now. This series has a great deal of potential, it just needs its wonderful content to be wielded with as great a skill as was used to invent it. So close, yet not cigar.

As for narration, as ever Simon Vance’s performance was great. He’s got a knack for producing older voices in that breathy manner of folk who’ve lived a long life and are about knackered out from all the shit they’ve still got to deal with. He’s great.

Personal Score: 3.75 stars

Professional Score: 4.0 stars