Science Fiction: Last First Snow, Max Gladstone (Craft Sequence)

So far I've read Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise, and I'm planning to get to Full Fathom Five this summer as my beach read.  I wanted to hit up Last First Snow because we get to go back in time to Dresediel Lex and Temoc and see Caleb as a child, and of course Elayne in her prime standing up to The King in Red.

Last First Snow (Craft Sequence)
Max Gladstone
ISBN: 9780765379405
Read April 10, 2016
Direct prequel to Two Serpents Rise, featuring Elayne, Temoc (& Caleb), and the King in Red.


This look back in time shows the traumatic events that shaped Caleb's young life and his estrangement with his father Temoc, which forms a huge part of Two Serpents Rise.  As part of a deal to revitalize the inner city, Elayne attempts to broker a deal that would slowly "improve" the warrenlike slums that form the Skittersill through investments and gentrification.  The locals heartily disapprove, and mysterious forces collude to skuttle the deal.  Furthermore, Temoc, the last of the old priests, is attempting to revitalize the worship of the old gods (whichever ones of them hadn't gotten outright killed off in the very recent God Wars) through spiritual rituals instead of human sacrifices.  The King in Red is brash and young (well, newer?  fresher?) and more easily led by spite and pique.  All of this is going to collide in an awful conflict that no one really wants, and no one quite knows who started, or who will gain.

Each of these books marries a weird spiritual or philosophical question with a banking issue, and this one is (no spoilers) concerned with gentrification and ownership of property and insurance fraud, twined around by questions of destiny, of legacy, of loyalty (between people, and between gods, and to ideals or philosophical goals), and of the peculiar responsibility that comes from being a public servant.

The story veers wildly between spiritual banking and physical mayhem, and the ending (even though you know what's coming, having presumably read Two Serpents Rise) is brutal and scouring.  I started this book way back in the fall last year, and put it down right before the finale due to ill health, and I'm glad that I did.  I'm much happier reading about terrible and horrible events in the bright light of a new spring than in the faded dead light of November.  I'm also glad to have had a while to disconnect from the characters, or the torment and anguish they face (especially Temoc) would have been too much for me to enjoy the story.

I was reminded again how much I like this conceit of soul-stuff as the basis of commerce, and of gods and magic as fundamentally financial and transactional in nature.  It's such a weird perfect system and the world is so like our own but skewed in so many little weird ways.  In this book, a character expends their entire stock of personal soul in a wild taxi ride, then pops up to an ATM in a hotel lobby and withdraws a fresh stock from a personal bank account to refill their soul and stay alive.  It's so wild and exotic, but so mundane and familiar.