Three Parts Dead

This was not my first time reading Three Parts Dead. In fact, I pre-ordered it when it first came out and read it then. Max Gladstone just released the second book of a sequel series to the original Craft Sequence books and in getting ready to read the Craft Wars books, I decided to go back and read the original Craft Sequence. Let me begin by saying that my original pre-order was based on the fact that when I originally heard about Three Parts Dead, I immediately went to pre-order it because the premise sounded like it was written precisely for me. Like specifically for me. It was exactly the intersection of interests. Premise

That premise is that the Craft Sequence books take place in a world where the law is magic. This book came out while I was just starting my second year of law school. I am both a giant law nerd AND a giant fantasy nerd. So that sentence was enough to snag me. Especially as Gladstone wrote an article with Tor before the book came out that it was inspired by his wife being in law school and the pseudo-Latin that lawyers are subjected to in school sounding like the incantations you’d expect to hear in a magical school book. Which is true. Res Judicata and post hoc ergo propter hoc and Res Loquitur all sound like things a wizard would shout to make things happen. There are days working as a lawyer where I am sad I can’t just shout legal latin at people and make things happen.

Anyway, the plot of Three Parts Dead centers around Tara, a graduate of the Hidden Schools, see: magical law school. The Hidden Schools teach you how to be a magical contracts lawyer slash necromancer. Again, I told you that as a law student slash fantasy geek I thought this sounded awesome. Tara is offered a job, but the permanency of that position relies on her impressing the bosses. That job just happens to be the resurrection of a dead god using contract magic that looks like bankruptcy law tracking the movement of divine energy like forensic accounting. But like, exciting and necromancy. I might be a giant nerd, but trust me.

Abelard is another major character in the book, being a priest of the dead fire god of Alt Coulumb. He’s tasked with showing Tara around and acts sort of like the Watson character for when magic needs explained to the audience.

Cat is a servant of Justice, formerly the goddess Seril before her death in the God Wars and reconstruction into a new being in a situation not entirely unlike the current one. She’s trying to investigate the murder of a judge who was supposed to hear the case and deal with the implications of all that comes out of the case. What I Liked

Okay, so this book released right at the beginning of my second year of law school. Like I said, the premise of magical lawyers was right up my alley. I bought this knowing that the likelihood I connected with it was near 100%. And I did connect with it. Gladstone, now probably better known for being a co-author of This is How You Lose the Time War (see: another instant pre-order for me from premise), gets a voice to the characters and has a skill for the world-building that just makes the whole thing make sense like why wouldn’t law be magic?

Early in my career, and still today honestly, Tara being this newbie thrown out into the world and having to impress everyone by doing everything herself just resonates. She’s got flaws in being too sure of what she’s doing and it does lead her into trouble just as often as into a correct answer. She’s a great character to center this book around. What Didn’t Work for Me

This thing was an ambitious debut for Gladstone and in juggling the plots, there was one that wasn’t hit out of the park for me on this first book. Cat has a plot around having something missing that leads her into a vampire addiction, but Cat’s deal never really gets too fleshed out beyond that and beyond being a parallel to the current situation if it goes wrong. That makes Justice’s role in the finale with the Gargoyle fight and with De Novo in the Temple of Justice feel a little ex machina to use some pseudo-Latin. Cat just felt a little under-developed compared to Tara and Abelard. Overall

Overall, this is honestly one of my favorite book series. And this was the book that got me hooked on it and paying attention to what else Gladstone wrote.

Sure Cat could use some additional fleshing out, but that didn’t keep me from flipping pages into the night to see what came next even on my re-read.

So, this is a great book and you should definitely check it out.

I'm planning to read the Craft Sequence in publication order, so this is the first one I read.

I had trouble getting into it at first. Gladstone crams a lot of universe details into the first several chapters without much explanation. Things get less murky as you go, though, and I started enjoying the stylish prose and intricate universe, including the magical-realist(?) moments of bureaucratic legal systems governing the magic. I appreciated the centering of women as key actors and villainizing of an abusive, misogynist man.

Reasons stars were docked: at times the prose was so flowery as to be ambiguous, and I had a lot of trouble visualizing what exactly was going on. But my biggest complaint is that the characters all felt kind of flat. I'm a reader who loves to love characters and their development, and I found myself kind of uninterested in all of them, with the exception maybe of Cat. The protagonist seemed a bit Mary Sue to me, sort of a generic plucky hero with a troubled past, to the point where even the "conflict" interactions with other characters (e.g. Cat) seemed contrived.

I'm planning to continue reading the series because I remain interested in the universe, and I'm told that things get better as Gladstone's writing matures.

On the one hand, Gladstone has created something entirely unique, here: a magico-legal thriller about apotheosis set in a steampunk theocracy. So far, so good. I love a lot of the little touches: the Seril/Justice story in particular is extremely well-done, as is his handling of the workings of magic. I found the wry humor in several parts charming. Gladstone's characters are a little thin, but well-loved and the ensemble cast overall works well. On the one hand, the ruse of "character X is so naive, I have to tell them about setting point Y" is over-used and very obvious; on the other, it gets the reader up to speed quickly on the (really lovely) world-building.

However, there are some books one can only get through on a plane. This is one of them. Gladstone shifts perspectives approximately once every 2-3 pages and it's completely jarring. This is especially true because there is so much world-building that the reader has to keep in mind, that to remember "OK, she's using the Craft for which she needs her special knife and blah-glyph and there are clouds, so it will be less powerful" for long enough to get back to the scene where that information is relevant is difficult.

I might read more books from the series, but only if the perspective-shifting is substantially better -- it's too bad, because it does overwhelm the otherwise good writing.

I had a whole review typed up and then the browser ate it. I'm so bitter.

Okay, from the top:

I'm not sure how to talk about this book because the worldbuilding is so original that there are very few points of comparison I know how to make. It reminds me, a little of LeGuin's [b:A Wizard of Earthsea|979683|A Wizard of Earthsea|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1179964011s/979683.jpg|41219814], maybe because of the island nations, but it is really nothing like that. It reminds me a little of [b:The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms|6437061|The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (The Inheritance Trilogy, #1)|N.K. Jemisin|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1303143211s/6437061.jpg|6626657], because of how richly textured the world is, but it's only a little like that.

The cover, actually, gives a pretty good taste of the book, although my copy has a slug from Jerry Pournelle, who may have pretty good name recognition, but is not, IMO, appealing to the same tastes. (Also, I think the last time I saw a non-white, non-sexualized, brown woman on a genre novel's cover, it was a book by Nnedi Okorafor.)

Lightreads, in her review, links to a post by the author in which he talks about how bankruptcy proceedings are basically a form of necromancy, which gives you some idea of what this book is about.

The story follows Tara, a student who has been violently graduated from the Hidden Schools, where she gained mastery of Craft, and a highly placed enemy. She subsequently gains employment with the firm of Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao, and for her first job, must deal with the death of the god Kos Everburning, who powers the city of Alt Coulumb.

Tara is an interesting protagonist, because she has a steel-sharp ethical flexibility which made her a bit difficult for me to feel confident liking. She has convictions, but also a sort of unshakable faith in her convictions and education that allows her to highhandedly lie, withhold, and interfere in the affairs of entire cities without too much second-guessing.

Also, this is a book written by a dude, mainly about ladies, that never made me go "this was a book written by a dude" so props.