![]() ![]() I also was fascinated by the rich culture she created: the Wanderers, the Travelers, the Renegades, and other castes in the sort-of medieval setting. I like the author’s writing style: simple, direct descriptive language that creates vivid scenes. This is a hard book for me to review because there was so much I liked, but also so much I found incomprehensible. I highly recommend Al-Shanti’s stories to readers who love immersing themselves in exquisite world-building. The author provides backstory without bogging the individual tales down, but there is a lot of information to absorb and some is simply provided as a matter of fact without explanation. ![]() ![]() The stories are complex, and I’m glad I read a previous book so that I had some familiarity with the world. There’s a small conclusion, a new magic skill, a battle won, but in each case, the story must continue in defiance of the Mad Sorcerer. For this reason, the stories don’t end like standard short stories. Each is a slice of life taken from characters in different parts of the map or belonging to different groups. The stories are loosely connected through the world-building but otherwise don’t overlap. I’ve read Children of the Dead City and recognized many aspects of the world, it’s politics and its people. In this collection of 5 short stories/novelettes, the author introduces the reader to the world that forms the basis of her longer novel(s). Al-Shanti writes beautiful prose and her world-building is both vast and intricate. ![]()
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