Spoilers for _Sethra Lavode_ contained within. If you're on digest you may want to hit the page down button a couple of times. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * I finished _Sethra Lavode_ last night. I wasn't "wowed" by it but I guess it brought things to a conclusion. It wasn't as satisfying as I would have hoped. Maybe if I go back to _Paths of the Dead_ and read the whole story >from beginning to end things will seem more interesting. The biggest problem with the story of the _Viscount of Adrilankha_ is that it can't seem to decide if it's really a story about Piro or a story about Khaavren. Piro is ostensibly the subject of the tale but he's pretty much just a plot device who gets pushed around from here to there in order to show Khaavren's conflicted side. _Sethra Lavode_ is a bit like watching _Attack of the Clones_. That is, if you cut out nearly all of the scenes with Annakin in them and make the film an adventure story starring Obi-Wan then you just about have the makings of a good movie. _Sethra Lavode_ could lose most of the scenes of Piro and his band without losing much of the story at all. I would have liked more "screen time" for Tazendra and Aerich. Tazendra is MIA most of the novel and sort of gets her revenge using sorcery. Yet, as a Dzurlord it would have been more satisfying for me to see her go down swinging. I guess the problem here is that Illista is a minor "straw man" character at best and I just didn't hate or despise her enough to care much about the way she died. Aerich, I don't understand at all. He knows that he's walking into a trap, apparently plans accordingly, and then when he finally arrives his plan seems to be "stand around hoping for the best until I'm killed". Even the Deus Ex Machina of having Piro's band arrive through a contrived set of circumstances isn't enough to actually help him do anything effective. Perhaps it's all simply supposed to be about that one break in Aerich's cool when he cries "Tazendra!". Even then, there's so little character development that anybody who, for some reason, had not read the previous two novels would not give it any particular significance. It seems that Aerich's only purpose in the story is to die so that Khaavren and Piro can be reunited. "I have no more objections to make. My conscience is dead." On a more minor note, I'm a bit surprised that Grita fell prey to the old stereotype of "Teckla are insignificant. I have more important things to do than kill something that's beneath my notice." She had tangled with Khaavren and his friends more than once. She ought to have known better and killed Mica as soon as he showed up. I hate to give a negative review. I certainly never felt like "this is bunk, why I am reading it" or anything. It just wasn't what I'd come to expect >from the greater Dragaeran cycle. The entire _Viscount_ story felt more like a recounting of an RPG session with some history thrown up around it as a backdrop than like the sort of novel we got in _The Phoenix Guards_ and _Five Hundred Years After_. Part of the problem is that Paarfi is telling the story. His viewpoint as a historian is too remote from the events he's describing to be exciting. More than once I found myself wishing that I was getting a first-hand account of the story instead of Paarfi's account. It says something that the one of the most interesting passages was the "preface" which not only gave us some insight into Paarfi's character (and thus some questions about the trustworthiness of his reporting) but which also raised the somewhat interesting question of "How many times can you meet someone for the first time?" Overall, I'd have to give it two stars out of four. For me personally, I would rather have had the story of the Interregnum from the point of view of someone personally involved (Sethra, maybe) with Khaavren and friends acting off-stage rather than have Paarfi's verbose narration of events. Paarfi works great when he's reporting on personal relations and interactions. When he's taking a larger view of great events, he's a lot less interesting, IMO.