Apologies to all, I’m wa-aaay behind on writing reviews of books I read weeks ago, actually I’m behind on reading books too. My timelines for new recommended reading lists and thoughts about previously read books that I put up shortly after the turn of the year are completely shot as well. Turns out that I’m just a bad blogger, maybe I should limit myself to reviews that are the same length as tweets, although I suspect they might take even longer as you’d just constantly rearrange letters, striving to find the perfect combination of characters to sum up all aspects of books that last multiple hundreds of pages. Maybe this is a project for a future section of the blog ‘Great Works of Literature Distilled into Tweets’, only problem being that it’d be a terrible spoiler.
But, the point of this post is not to bemoan my inability to sit down for a couple of hours and wrangle words into coherent sentences, it’s to tell you all that I finished another Uncommoners book, ‘The Smoking Hourglass’ is book number two in the series. I mentioned in a previous blog that I’m alternating the Uncommoners books with the Malazan Book of the Fallen, so far so good, they’re practically the perfect antidotes to each other.
‘The Smoking Hourglass’ continues in much the same vein as ‘The Crooked Sixpence’, Lundinor is further explored, more uncommon items and their uses are revealed and the backstory is expanded. It’s a kid’s book so it’s somewhat obligatory that adult characters are either nefarious villains intent on world domination, overly trusting parent figures with dubious safeguarding methods, or benevolent patrons who bestow their wisdom sparingly and usually after the fact. What kind of a story would you get if no one wanted to take over the world, parents or equivalents took routine decisions that ensured the safety of children, and authority figures acted quickly to curtail criminal activities?
The Uncommoners series remains highly recommendable, and so I shall do just that, get a copy and get reading.