Lots going on in this book, the fourth in the series, finally knocking over all the dominoes that had been set up in the prior 3x900-pages of the series. By the time you're looking at this book, you hardly need me to tell you what's it's about, so I won't.

It reminded me why I appreciate Tad Williams' super-long series, though. He's able to use that space to set up so much and make characters so fully human that it doesn't feel like the books should be any shorter, and the payoff is big: the climax here was hundreds of pages long, and then took another hundred pages of flashbacks and exposition to fully unravel, and then there were enough endings that Peter Jackson would be envious, and I teared up at least three times in reading those endings.

In this reread of the series, I also very much appreciated the little "net feed" vignettes that open each chapter, each a short story in a hundred words, some linked, and many seeming so very prescient as to the 20 years that have followed the series' publication.