Mere words do not do justice to this book. It's not just a brilliant piece of work; it's a breakthrough in epic fantasy writing. Brian Staveley totally killed it with this one.
Continuing from where he left off in the Emperor's Blades(cliffhanger), it was always going to be tough to start Providence of Fire with as much intensity as the last few chapters in Emperor's Blades. PoF started slowly. Too slow for my liking, actually. The main characters seemed weak. But then the story began to gradually unravel, giving way to something bigger than I expected. The plot has no boundaries. Just when I thought it couldn't get worse, it did! Almost impossibly, I thought, the plot pushed against its boundaries, making the end as distant as possible, virtually invisible!
It's so unlike normal epic fantasy.
It's like the beginnings of a game of chess between two foes in which the game gets bigger than the chessboard, bigger than the players, bigger than the room they're playing in... The minute you think you've seen the major players in the game, bigger ones turn up. And on and on and on it goes!
I think this book rivals ASoIaF in complexity and plot size. The writing is excellent. The characters are memorable. Plus the story is neither magic heavy nor entirely magic reliant. Makes readers focus more on the plot.
Unfortunately, Brian Staveley ended this one on a cliffhanger. As much as I'd like to continue the story, I'll just have to wait, wait, wait, wait...
