I mostly sat on this review as I was on holiday when I finished the book and my head was spinning, full of things I thought I wanted to say about it, that the time and place would simply not allow me to put down. Also I was quite upset about the ending (even though I very much saw it coming) and I needed to clear my mind.

Well, I am still at a bit of a loss of how to truly put together my thoughts about the books and I am a very busy woman who just came back from a Twice concert, with Hare Hare (https://youtu.be/-uqWaGzQyxA?si=m91cgLIHdAYCqFi2) still stuck in her mind, so I might be incoherent in spite of the two weeks it took me to get to writing this (also I might edit this eventually but not tonight)..

It has been so long since “Dark Age”, let alone “Iron Gold”, and mostly what I remembered about them was how difficult they were to get through. Never a good sign and it made me decidedly unexcited to pick this book up - which I mostly did anyway since I am determined to see this series through, least of all out of the genuine love I had for the original trilogy and the characters.

So I could only be pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this. As a novel, it felt much closer to the original trilogy than the previous two instalments. It seems like - and I hope this is not making it personal except where some of the author’s actions went against my personal beliefs - Brown dropping the NFT grift and going back to rework his novel has really paid off for him here. Even the P.O.V.’s that were previously some of the biggest drags of book 4 and 5 (yes, Lyria and especially Lysander) read well and were engaging; the characters they belonged to really started coming to their own. Lyria becomes here a much more fleshed out character, while Lysander’s politicking brings in the change of pace that his P.O.V. should have always provided (a less battle-heavy brute-force setting most of the time, though I still have some issues with it - more on that later).

However, the absolute largest contributing factor to the novel is the character dynamics between Darrow and Cie. - which I cannot discuss without spoilers beyond saying that it was a true return to form for the novel. It is no coincidence that the characters at multiple points reference watching footage of their Institute days or reminisce on them; a lot of this book feels like it and is steeped in nostalgia. It is almost like Brown, too, needed to return to his origins in order to re-discover his voice and the life of the series in order to be able to move forward. As a novel this does a lot of character growth which the interpersonal dynamics between the cast become even more important.

[SPOILER] For this novel, he brings back together Darrow, Sevro and Cassius, the latter too being in my personal Top 3 of the series and this dynamic being an absolute delight to me. I may be biased but please understand, this dynamic works so well because there is so much bad blood in places and each of those people is stuck in a rut and getting out of it includes forgiveness to one’s self and others. It is a very classic plot but well executed to a level of queerbaiting that would have the Shounen Jump editorial staff screaming, crying, throwing up, etc.

And then we add to this dynamic a crew rounded out by Lyria whose dynamic with the trio is hilarious but also endearing when it comes to Cassius (and even Sevro). And even Diomedes and Aurae, the former being an off-beat but fitting addition who balances the crew out well. The Archimedes truly manages to re-capture the heart of the series and win readers like myself back. Maybe we should consider giving this particular crew to someone like Becky Chambers and see what they could do with it, just a thought.[SPOILER END]

The novel itself also feels well thought out, even if heavy-handed at places. People with better retention memory than me, I am sure, can point out some inconsistencies with previous instalments in the series but given that I began reading them more than 10 years ago, I personally am not too precious about it. Within the bounds of the novel itself, however, there is a good sense of pace and a good build-up to key dramatic moments.

This was another aspect of what made the original trilogy so great to read and experience. To me it seems like Brown has always had a great sense of what makes a dramatic moment and how to build that imagery. It is something I generally appreciate greatly in action-driven stories. He is not quite at the level of someone like, let’s say Eiichiro Oda (where this is one of my favourite aspects of “One Piece”), but the memory of scene of Sevro nearly hanging himself to prove a point and save Cassius’s life in “Morning Star” still has me reeling 7 years on. And in this novel, even scenes like [SPOILER] Lysander near dying from poisoning, blood tears falling down his face, him falling down, curling up [SPOILER END] show that a big scale battle is not always required for a scene to be grand.

And talking about grand scenes, I cannot not talk about what upset me so - [SPOILER] Cassius’s death (again). We spend a lot of the novel falling back in love with Cassius’s character; he is one of the emotional centres of the novel. He is given a chance at redemption. And all of this on its own is great, albeit not always elegant, foreshadowing for what is to come. Honestly, the reader can clock in pretty early that he will be dead by the end of the series, if not by the end of the book. Personally, I wished we had him for longer due to some of the reasons described above (I can already see myself struggling through the next 1000 pages that “Red God” will likely hit). But I also understand why narratively, he needed to die now and he needed to die by Lysander’s hand, this time directly.

The consolation here is this - his death was very well executed and the incorporation of references to previous key moments of his journey was excellently, delightfully done. The audience seeing the body vs. not having seen it the first time around when he was “killed”, for one - it was what keyed me in, personally, that he might be not dead after all the first time, making the finality of this ending all the more devastating. Him being hung after his body being brutalised by Lysander’s Praetorians is also such a strong reference back to the attempted hanging I mentioned above (and the fact that the Morning Star and the Lightbringer are the same ship). His last words being a reference to the duels with the au Raas. There is something very satisfying about seeing all of this put together in such a way. [SPOILER END]

The one thing I am on the fence about, however, is Lysander’s character. As I mentioned above, this time around his chapters were much more interesting to get through and I felt his arc overall makes sense. Where it seems like it falls through, however, is that it cannot seem to decide whether it is an exploration in the making of a tyrant, trying to pull off the villain being human, too, because it can be a compelling plotline, or whether it is a way to add to the worldbuilding of the novel since Brown seems to enjoy writing a war novel. Both could be true, too, but they would require complete and utter dedication in order to hold up to examination.

However, Lysander’s P.O.V. has the annoying habit of holding information back to spring up on the reader later from what appears to be some misguided belief that plot twists are absolutely necessary for an interesting and exciting novel. They are not and are holding Lysander’s P.O.V. back from its full potential. On one side is the fact that if we really wanted some of that information to be a twist later on or to remain vague or misunderstood to serve the plot, why have his P.O.V. at all. (For example, [SPOILER] there is a lot of the battle for Ganymede which is in Mustang’s P.O.V. and could have probably been entirely in it and come off entirely compelling [SPOILER END]). I enjoy the political games to a degree but there are plenty of other ways to work them in.

On the other side is that we are literally in Lysander’s head for the entirety of his chapters - this is 1st person narration. Unreliable narrators are all well and good and can be very compelling but is this what he really is doing? Or is just information being held back from the reader for the reasons described above? The effect of it is that it stops the reader from fully immersing themselves into the character and starting to ask the difficult moral questions a character like Lysander should be prompting. It makes him feel inconsistent as a character and keeps the reader from seeing the transformation the exploration of such a character warrants. It is not that Brown has not done this to a degree with other characters but since Lysander moves so much of the plot here, it becomes particularly egregious.

I might be making this a bigger issue than it is - I did, after all, say I enjoyed the novel greatly and read through Lysander’s chapters (mostly) happily. And I nearly rated this 4.5☆ but rounded it down out of fear of making it better in my head than it actually was.

Generally the extended battles were a bit of a pain to get through but here this is the section in the first half mostly led by Mustang and Lysander (sorry to say to Pierce Brown but I do not think this is where his strengths lie at all. Maybe why “Dark Age” was such a pain), but one or two off battle chapters worked much better. One thing this book definitely did, though, and it was want to re-read the whole series. I am well stocked with the audiobooks this time around (mostly because they kept bringing up how beautiful [SPOILER] Cassius [SPOILER END]’s accent was and it made me more curious about the accents used in the audiobook).

This novel really managed to make me excited about the series again, or at least curious enough to want to guess where it will go narratively while it has a good hold of its own imagery and internal logic. [SPOILER[ (For example, it would make sense to get Lyria kill Lysander in the end. She is an interesting counterpart to Darrow and his Red anger, except she never gets the chances he gets; and Lysander being another Gold tyrant. Both being Cassius’s protégés and even the alliteration of their names. But will she? Would Darrow go back to the Daughters of Athena, as promised, and would this be a suitable end of his arc?) [SPOILER END] I said I will not be reading 680 more pages of this but I think I will very much will be.