Not as good as the first. A slow beginning bogs down further across a complicated middle before everything resolves pretty much as expected for the almost exciting ending. Which is sadly a little bit what I was suspecting, and it's a common problem for mid-trilogies books, made worse in this case by a couple of particular factors. The thrill of the first volume was the entire books concept. That was novel and exciting, but we're familiar with it now. There are some nuances to explore, but the central tenant of the book must change. However the bit that hasn't changed is Dale's third hand description of the events supposedly told from an unbelievable couple of decades in the future. In this case it's a poor choice to make - a couple of decades in the future is a drastically different society, but there's no reference to that anywhere. It also means that everyone Dale relates as a first person view must survive - although there's an attempt at cheating there. And so all the action scenes become tempered, slowed and loses the appeal and immediacy of tension that is necessary fro them to be exciting. In a book that's already struggling to maintain engagement with too many characters spread too thinly over confused political schisms interleaved with almost but not fully explained sub-plots and myths, loosing the tension and drama in the critical actions scenes really doesn't help.

That said it remains a very entertaining look at society, the problems of both central authority and more anarchic systems of government.

Jory finds that the Chapel isn't everything he'd hoped when he transferred his allegiance away from the Circle, and becomes disillusioned with being Robin Hood. He tries, but he knows some of what the Circle is doing, even if not all their methods is correct. And then Merry and his peacemaking attempt is corrupted, and he splits to become a third party of devices competing for power between the others, not in any legend.

I don't quite know where, but it's probably in Dale's retrospective telling that somehow all the emotion and passion gets lost. A couple split up, but instead of this passionate argument full of rights wrongs and justifications you get a pale semi-reasoned debate. It doesn't feel right, and it doesn't empathise with anyone, it doesn't engage. There are several more scenes like this that just need a bit more oomph and then the book would be excellent.

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on re-read, works a bit better, you're more familiar with the characters and their situations become more relevant and absorbing. There's still a lot of jumping about between characters and a fair amount of really obscure authurian history, but although the spark certainly isn't as clever as the 1st book, it does quite well for a middle series book, and ends particularly triumphantly ( )