Dead Country: Book One of the Craft Wars Series

Another good novel fleshing out the Craft Sequence and the rules by which it abides. The setting is slightly less interesting for returning home to her birthplace, but it allows for a different exploration of faith vs Craft construction. The Craft sections are interesting, which is good because the diversions the books takes in other areas become a bit tedious. I don't need this much suggestive sex in my high fantasy, but at least it sticks to the suggestive. As usual I will read what follows.

The first five Craft books were really good. They told a great (continuing) story which was primarily about the external world in which Tara Abernathy lives. While this isn't the first time the reader gets to see inside Tara's head in the series, it's the first detailed, thorough, internal tour of who she is, how she's changed, how she meets challenges new and old. The death of a parent, facing the ghosts of a childhood home, becoming a reluctant mentor... all of it is new for Tara, but the rawness and power with which Gladstone writes all these suggest he has lived it all. Bravo!