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A really fun read with a unique style.
The opening chapter feels heavy and dark, and by the end of it, I was a little worried that this was going to be too much of a grim cyberpunk dystopia for me. In total contrast, the second chapter feels like a light barroom frolic with a plethora of nearly-cartoonish magical creatures. Had the second chapter been like the first, I'd have quit reading, but had the first chapter been like the second, I'd not have gone any further -- but the balance of the two left me curious about the world that held both.

A tale of corporate intrigue, magical intrigue, and romance, spools out from that contrast. Mackie's world is a dark corporate dystopia overlaid on ancient laws of magic. Shadowrun's Tolkien + Gibson is an obvious parallel, but really doesn't quite capture the feeling of Lucky Devil's setting. The magic here is more faerie tale than D&D, and the dystopia is less obsessed with data and privacy than it is with the feeling of passing through overlapping company towns. It feels believably inconvenient, at times painfully likely, and underlaid with strange mysteries of magic that many in the setting treat with a believable sort of mundane blase, even when that's to their own detriment. The setting remains a grim corporate dystopia, but the counterpoint makes it feel like a livable one.

Mackie's narrative voice is also uniquely feminine in a way I find difficult to explain. It's not that the story feels exclusive to a female audience (far from it), but rather that there's an unusually clear feminine voice in the narration. I've read many, many sci-fi and fantasy stories by female authors, and with female protagonists, but generally the tone feels more gender neutral. I could not explain to you how Mackie creates that feeling exactly, but somehow through word choice and sentence structure she does, and it lends a refreshingly unique narrative perspective to even the most familiar tropes.

It's a great read for fans of cyberpunk and urban fantasy alike.

A brilliant conclusion to a brilliant series. Whatever Bancroft's next project is, I'm already sold.

If you've already read the first three books, it feels silly to try and sell you on book 4. You're already compelled, and you should be, it's great. My one and only criticism is that I think the story continues a bit too many beats beyond the end. It's nothing terrible, but there's definitely a point where I went, "The end! Oh, wait, there's a few more chapters. Huh."

It's a common enough thing in the wrap-up of an epic. So common, that it'd be easier to list exceptions than series that did the same thing to some degree or another. In a series this full of unalloyed genius it's actually somewhat nice to see a bit of... alloy? Imperfection? It almost makes me feel like Bancroft could be some sort of human person, instead of the eloquent spirit being I typically imagine.

So, a 4 for the conclusion, but I still recommend this series to everyone I know. It's amazing, and the ending is amazing, and I loved it. It just didn't need those last few bits.

Another great entry into Woolliscroft's Wildfire Cycle!
Kingshold had the peculiar effect of being way more interesting retrospectively than it was at the time. It was a fun fantasy adventure, but I found I liked it much more weeks after finishing it, as the ideas continued to percolate with me, and I think Woolliscroft's clever approach of weaving collections of short stories between the main entries in his series has dramatically broadened the fantasy world he offers. The short story collections majorly impacted my appreciation of the 'third' volume, and so if you've been skipping them to get to the meat of the action, I encourage you to go back and give them a read. While they're not strictly necessary to understand the plot, I think that Ajiwiak would have been a lot less exciting of a read without having perused all the interstitial material from those collections.

Ajiwiak continues the gradual ramping of tensions and breadth of conflict. While Kingshold was mostly about the one kingdom (and really mostly the one city within that one kingdom), and Ioth expanded to international and religious politics, in Ajiwiak things grow into spiritual and cosmological levels. The spiritual aspects parallel nicely with the themes of colonialism, particularly with split perspectives offered from both the locals and their invaders.

Ajiwiak was a magnetic story, pulling me back in with new questions and new twists. New magic, new monsters, and new layers built atop Woolliscroft's already inventive world.

I love Benedict Patrick's Yarnsworld setting. It has such a great fairy-tale feel that doesn't quite match what you usually get in fantasy, particularly in fantasy aimed at adults. City of Swords is a classic tale -- farm boy seeks a life of adventure -- but the spark of life Patrick brings in his characterization mixes beautifully with a brilliantly original world of magic.

Every other chapter is a myth from the setting. As the farm boy's story progresses, you're also drawn deeper and deeper into the lore of this corner of Yarnsworld. It's a bit of meso-American adventure, reminding me vaguely of Zorro, but steeped in a strange mythology. Patrick masterfully mixes legendary and mythic layers in this series. In the cities there is swashbuckling heroics, but always surrounded by the terrifying magic of the wilderness. I start the book out knowing that they're all going to come together somehow, and yet when they do, it's still unexpectedly awesome.