Cast in Sorrow – Michelle Sagara

A weak entry in a strong series

I love this series, but I thought this ninth book to be the weakest of the lot. It has the writing style and the fun with language that I enjoy in the Elantra series - but the story-telling is lacking. There’s a great deal of exposition. “So long as we’re walking down this endless corridor, let me tell you more.” There’s a great deal of what, in another series, would be dream symbolism. In this series the protagonist spends many pages trying to make sense of externalizations of other entities’ states of mind or states of being. And for every plot there’s a plot device: There’s no problem that can’t be solved by the marks growing brighter or by the familiar exhibiting a superpower or by the protagonist guessing what the author wants her to do. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for story.

Perhaps it’s an editing problem: “Cast in Sorrow” is the second half of a thousand-page book that should have been five-hundred pages long, and has five-hundred pages of story. As the books are structured, there’s no obvious way to slim them down to one novel’s length. The structure would have to change.

Am I going to read book ten when it appears? Of course I will; I can’t wait. But I’m a fan. Other fans of this series won’t need my recommendation (or anyone else’s) to read this book. I wouldn’t recommend it to people who aren’t fans.