Tanya Huff, the Quarters novels
Oct. 18th, 2013 07:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI just finished 'The Quartered Sea', the last book of four, after Sing the Four Quarters, Fifth Quarter, and No Quarter. I liked the first book in the series best, by a long way. I tried to figure out why and I think it's just the personal relationships and emotional challenges of the main characters.
The books are set in the same world and follow related characters, not a single character. I liked the star of the first book best, and her somewhat complex love stories and family relationships. The second and third books were devoted to a sister and brother getting untangled from a really unhealthy relationship with each other, and the fourth was mostly one guy off on his own having a really miserable time while learning confidence.
They're all perfectly good stories, but I spent most of the second book vastly uncomfortable at the relationship, and the fourth book... well, it was a lot of miserable. A lot. So it wasn't a fun reading experience.
The writing is plenty good, and I like a lot of the characters across all four books. I like the worldbuilding and the musically mediated system of magic, where the four physical elements are called Quarters, putting them in a naming quandry when they discover the fifth, spirit. The danger is plenty frightening and the solutions are always satisfyingly drawn from the characters and their demonstrated capabilities. Proper shaped stories.
I just didn't have much fun reading them, and probably won't want to revisit most of those people in future.
People that aren't squicked by incest and don't mind ... is it whumping that's hurt/comfort basically unleavened by comfort? Relentless lonely misery, while separated from people equally miserable to have lost him. If you don't mind reading a lot of that while watching someone win their way through it, you might like these books better than I did.
But I quite like reading about relationships and friends and the possibility of things going well, so The Quartered Sea was a bit darker than I'd like.
The books are set in the same world and follow related characters, not a single character. I liked the star of the first book best, and her somewhat complex love stories and family relationships. The second and third books were devoted to a sister and brother getting untangled from a really unhealthy relationship with each other, and the fourth was mostly one guy off on his own having a really miserable time while learning confidence.
They're all perfectly good stories, but I spent most of the second book vastly uncomfortable at the relationship, and the fourth book... well, it was a lot of miserable. A lot. So it wasn't a fun reading experience.
The writing is plenty good, and I like a lot of the characters across all four books. I like the worldbuilding and the musically mediated system of magic, where the four physical elements are called Quarters, putting them in a naming quandry when they discover the fifth, spirit. The danger is plenty frightening and the solutions are always satisfyingly drawn from the characters and their demonstrated capabilities. Proper shaped stories.
I just didn't have much fun reading them, and probably won't want to revisit most of those people in future.
People that aren't squicked by incest and don't mind ... is it whumping that's hurt/comfort basically unleavened by comfort? Relentless lonely misery, while separated from people equally miserable to have lost him. If you don't mind reading a lot of that while watching someone win their way through it, you might like these books better than I did.
But I quite like reading about relationships and friends and the possibility of things going well, so The Quartered Sea was a bit darker than I'd like.