Noonshade

Sometimes great, sometimes unbearable.

Noonshade continues the story of The Raven, a mercenary group of great skill and perhaps greater luck, as they race to save the world (again) from a cataclysm of their own making. An invasion of seemingly all powerful dragons.

Barclay's return to the world of Balaia is an interesting (if oft times frustratingly written) read. While the world is obviously well developed and full of political depth (unfortunately under-utilised in the Raven books) Barclay's writing can often feel overly floral, reminiscent of Tolkien's penchant for metaphor heavy descriptions, but without the same skill. This can lead to an often frustrating breaking of pace and flow as Barclay stops to describe the view in every direction, never truly capturing the spectacular vistas he is obviously imagining.

The inconsistency in pace is matched by an often unexplained, and jarring inconsistency in characters, who will change mood, and in some cases intellect level, between scenes without so much as a word to why, and swing back the very next scene.

Then there's the sense of scale. Barclay's description leaves no doubt that Balaia is an expansive place, and yet travel times give lie to this, characters, and sometimes entire armies covering distances the reader imagines to be dozens of miles in less than a single night.

One thing that is ever consistent, and consistently eyeroll inducing, is Barclay's struggle to make the dragons, and their world sympathetic, and beautiful. (Spoiler ahead) Indeed characters who come in contact with either seem to immediately value both well above the human world they struggled to save in the previous book. (End spoiler) It's painful to read, and I certainly ended up with mostly contempt for both dragons and their world, the former coming off as arrogant, imperious brutes with little intellect (as much as Barclay describes them as genius), and the latter a meaningless environment devoid of real charm.

None of this is to speak of the awful romantic writing, barely a feature but still better off removed. Written so idealistically as to be nauseating, with barely any consequence for rude and distant behaviour.

The real saving grace of the book is the interesting approach to magic, which I'd have liked to see more done with given how much detail is gone into. It often feels that for all the depth there are really only six spells.

Honestly, with a world that seems so rich, a deep magical system, and a group of main characters that felt so lifelike at the start of the series, it should have been hard to go wrong. Barclay managed it however, and I'm left with a disappointing memory from a book I had much hope for.