Harbinger – Wen Spencer

If you haven’t read the books that precede Harbinger, this book won’t work for you. You won’t know the many characters - and you won’t know why you’re expected to care about them. If you have read preceding books, you’ll want to have read all of them, because most of the book follows characters who are familiar primarily from short stories set in this milieu.

I have read the other books, and I’ve been enjoying this series. Harbinger was less fun to read than its predecessors, partly because of the lack of focus. (There is focus in the sense that the plot threads are all leading to the same climax. But the reader’s attention and engagement is scattered across too many minor characters.) And partly because Harbinger is half a book. It becomes apparent about halfway through the book that there simply aren’t enough pages left to end on anything but a cliff-hanger.

The first thing I did after reading the previous book - Wood Sprites - was go back and reread it. That didn’t happen with Harbinger, but the series as a whole still charms, and I look forward to the next book.