I really looked forward to reading this book. Don't get me wrong, I was so excited that I won this book. Just couldn't get into it. First the book took place 630,000 years in the future, really couldn't place the earth that far. The story line was pretty good, but the appendixes were very lengthy. As far as the narratives, I do believe they should have been in the beginning of the chapter or the end of it, or maybe in chapters by themselves. ( )

This was one book that took me a lot of time to get through. I liked the actual story but it was way to wordy and seemed to wander too much in the narrative. While I think I’m a pretty smart guy I found it disturbing that I had to break out the dictionary way to many times.

To sum this up I think that a good story is in this book somewhere however it needs some reworking to let it shine. The author definitely shows some talent but could be better served with a different editor. ( )

Twilight Ashes was not quite my type of book. The book was written, with multiple voices telling the story and left me confused. I had a hard time trying to figure who was talking about what and why. I also felt as if the story was being told backwards, with the end first and the rest of the book telling us the journey the characters took to get there. Of course, that may have been the authors intent, or my misinterpretation of the story. That confsion is the problem.

I really wanted to enjoy this book. In a way, I did. Auler Ivis obviously loves the written word, language and philosophy. This does not read like a freshman effort. Instead, the prose is steady and refined. Mostly.

The hardest part of the book for me was Dalle and Leafhopper. I didn't like them. I didn't like how they were written, nor did I like their place in the narrative. It is these parts of the story where Ivis' prose fails. Their dialog was unnatural and forced. Their sections of the story unnecessarily jarred me from the flow of the narrative. A simply restructuring of the story eliminates the need for their passages, and allows the reader to focus on the story.

Another problem I had was how far the book was set in the future. I understand that the story is set in a post human world, but 633,029 years later is a long time to hold on to any vestiges of our modern human society. I know this seems nit picky in the overall structure of the narrative, but at the back of my mind I kept thinking how far into the future that really is for humanity. We've been around for a fraction of that time, and look how things have changed. That far in the future, would anything be recognizable?

I honestly believe there is a book in Twilight's Ashes I would enjoy. Restructuring the narrative is crucial to the success of this book. As it stands, I believe the story of Jebden could be told in a simpler, tighter style that doesn't remove the reader from the narrative. That book would be a fun and lyrical tale that still contains a good dose of philosophy for the reader to ponder. ( )

Received a complimentary copy in an author giveaway (via LT).

In Twilight’s Ashes, Auler Ivis builds an intriguing world around the premise of the Earth evolving into an ice age, 630,000 years into our future.* A simple map establishes the setting, showing the western half of North America with selected placenames. These placenames are altered slightly, but their origin is clear enough: there is Ellay in the location of Los Angeles, for example, or the Dunes of Ark in the general vicinity of the Ozarks and Arkansas River Valley. It's dubious that anything resembling modern English would survive after 600 thousand years,** but as a literary device this approach is elegant. Each name stands in for a thousand words, a shorthand more effective in establishing the profound changes in landscape than any monograph delineating how mountains, rivers, weather, and vegetation differ from today. (And intentionally or not, this device also provides a good-natured poke at timeworn conventions of the genre: post-apocalyptic versions of our world “hiding” their origin behind superficial decay, and clumsy attempts at world-building which betray their inspiration as modern places with new, “exotic”-sounding names.)

The geopolitical changes are only half of the world Ivis imagines, however. If the ice age is the key physical change, Ivis assumes another evolution, this one mental / spiritual. Even as civilization seems to have “returned” to a nomadic or semi-agricultural existence predating 20c. technology, humanity appears to have heightened its religio-spiritual sensitivity. Not only are gods and deities an everyday part of life for the average person, across all the cultures encountered in the book, overall the species has shifted its approach from the Earth viewed as a physical resource, to a living place into which humans must fit themselves rather than impose upon. Ivis also imagines the species to take more than one evolutionary path, with an offshoot of the species (post-human) seemingly “missing” the spiritual development in favour of a more barbaric, physical existence. In short, the science behind this world, both in terms of geological and cultural evolution, seems solid if necessarily speculative.

Unfortunately, the very scale of Ivis’s achievement undermines his storytelling. Tangents and details creep in and obstruct the narrative flow. It’s not the prose: the action, dialogue, and characters are developed ably enough, and descriptive passages are by turns prosaic and efficiently sketched. And yet, the plot itself never takes hold. The central story of a journey from an ice-locked community into the wider world should have presented myriad opportunities for encountering our newly-imagined Earth, and Ivis for the most part exploits these. A chapter following the route of an underground river, wending through glaciers and mountains to the greener lands of the western coast, is a memorable example. But too often, the opportunities provided by the story prove insufficient for Ivis, and he repeatedly breaks away to touch on topics foreign to the story. For example, he introduces conversations between deities and a character outside the central story as a device for writing about the history of Earth, or the pantheon of gods and spiritual forces shaping the story. In addition to over 100 pages in appendices, Ivis offers not only an Introduction and Afterword, but a Prelude and a Prologue, each with a different narrative voice and setting. There is so much to tell, Ivis seemingly cannot content himself with his chosen story.

For me, these asides eclipsed the tale itself. I found compelling some of the material in the appendices: not so much the fictional archives expanding upon the world he created, but those passages providing a glimpse into how he, the author, was inspired to create the world. This world-building is quite an achievement, and I can understand Ivis’s interest in sharing that with an audience. But I’m left with the sense Ivis felt straitjacketed, is impatient to share the many ideas he has lying outside the ambit of his story, and so ... he simply writes it all. Consequently, Twilight’s Ashes ends up undermining itself. Better to have devoted his attention to the story he chose, and those parts of the world revealed as events unfold, than to segment his story, splinter it in a misguided attempt to reveal more than fits the plot.

* Consider: The agricultural revolution is estimated at 12,000 years ago; Homo sapiens reaches back perhaps 400,000 years, and modern man (Homo sapiens sapiens) maybe 200,000 years. Ivis’s imagined Earth is set in the far, far future, so distant as to be an alien planet.

** Correction: Ivis accounts for this, actually, in supposing that language becomes genetically encoded at this point in human evolution. I'd noted this as I read it, but overlooked it when writing the review. An interesting concept, bringing to mind Batesonian cybernetics, but I'm insufficiently familiar with genetic science to know whether specific language terms (as opposed to a capacity for language) conceivably could be transmitted by DNA. ( )