Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Well, I liked it, but I find it far from the incredibly mind-blowing fantasy I'd been led to believe. The world-building aspect was nice, but the fact that the author just starts throwing elements at you with no explanation isn't nice. Erikson takes it to crazy levels of "just roll with it". You have no idea who these people are, what they're doing or why, and especially when it comes to any of the magical elements. It makes no sense. There are several inter-twining stories that really seem to just fall apart at the end. Also, the poems or whatever they were at the beginning of chapters were horrible. Just plain really bad. The prose throughout the book was nothing special, but at least it was serviceable.
Frankly, there are some extremely cringe-worthy lines in this book. Something about people looking on with horror as the Adjunct killed the person she used to be...well, it was just plain bad.
All that being said, this book actually was fairly good and interesting. It's neither as horribly bad in parts as [b:The Night Land|970602|The Night Land|William Hope Hodgson|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348444715s/970602.jpg|955499] nor as amazing in others, but it's kind of similar. The story is definitely good enough to make up for the weaknesses. Not quite enough to make you ignore them, but it's not that big a book. I do plan on reading more of the series, and I hope Erikson overcame these flaws in his later books.
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