Shadowheart by Tad Williams

Shadowheart is the last of a quartet by Tad Williams.

Is it any good? It's ok. The Dragonbone Chair was one of my seminal reading moments- I was fifteen and pretty bored with what I had been reading and I stumbled across this in WHSmiths with scarcely enough money in my pocket to pay for it. It was big and had a cast of hundreds - something I'd been in love with since I'd read Lord of the Rings when I was 11.

So I have picked up nearly every TW book since then. Caliban's hour is still my favourite although Memory, Sorrow and Thorn will be the books that had most impact on me.

Back to Shadowheart. It's the climax of the series, and it roars along at a terrific pace, pulls together a great many threads and ties pretty much everything together. This is all good but in some ways it only serves to show up the weaknesses of the overall cycle as being overlong and underwhelming.

I can't criticise his world building but I think part of the problem is that he takes such care to reveal everything about his world that one feels it's completely exhausted. The most memorable stories, for me at least, have been those where worlds (real or fantastical) continue around the characters, where they are part of a larger tapestry even if they change the very nature of the world they're in. In some ways I find this difficult because nothing's left to the imagination. So, could it have been a book shorter? Maybe. Could it have been less comprehensive? Probably.

Still, it's a decent ending to an ok series.