This is my eighth blog post, and yet, I have only read two of the books I set myself to read. This is the final book in the edge chronicles which I did a post on earlier, and it was a very good ending. I wanted to read it all at once before we had to go to Italy, so I didn't read the first bit for first impressions, which I seem to be doing a lot.
It starts off with our main character in a mine where they mine stormphrax. It is a thing that explodes if hit not in twilight light, and its powder can be used to purify all liquids. But nothing comes without a price, and the phraxmines are very dangerous, because if a twilight lamp is lit too bright and someone hits a crystal of stormphrax, an explosion, too dark or not on at all, the crystal becomes heavier (they get heavier in darkness) and smashes through all the sleeping quarter's and kills everyone. The explosions are taken advantage of by sky-ships which use the explosion to keep their ship in the air. Nate Quarter is the main character who works in the mines until he gets caught in a drunken brawl and has to run away. He finds work in the city of Great Glade and becomes part of their thousandsticks team. The book skips forward a couple of years to when the big game against the other team is happening and the owner of the factory that Nate worked in is disowning his own son and letting Nate inherit the company. Then as it alternates between then (inheritance time) and now (thousandsticks time) and in the now time the disinherited son who was on the other team reveals that he blew up the factory to Nate (caused by an accident with a lamp and stormphrax, which would be blamed on Nate because it was his job to maintain the lamps) and then pushes him off the very high pole where the winning point is. The object of thousandsticks is to shove the other teams out of the way as you climb over hills, and then send your players up the pole hill and reach the top of the pole before anyone else. Then it turns out that the son killed his father by accident with the explosion, so he flees and so does Nate, his friend Slip, a bander bear (very large and intelligent bear), and Eudoxia who was the grand-daughter of the owner of the company who now just wants to find her father in the other city of the hive. When they get there they find her father taken as a political prisoner (they had to dress up as militia officials to see him) and then get swept into a war against the city of Great Glade. While the war is being lost by the Hive, Nate, Slip, the bander bear and Eudoxia manage to escape. Nate leaves Slip and the bear with Eudoxia's father and leaves to Riverrise with a friend they met on the way to the Hive. Eudoxia had a bullet in her ear and now is very sick, so they needed the healing water's of Riverrise to heal her. When they get there,. they realize that the place is a place where even your thoughts are unsafe because it is ruled by a waif (Waifs can read minds) tyrant and his waif followers. The waif, Golderayce, has been ruling Riverrise for thousands of years because only he has access the the very healing waters (which can reverse age) at the top of the waterfall which he hoards jealously, by controlling the flow of the waterfall. But what is needed to cure Eudoxia is the very healing waters, some easily found herbs, and some that are only found up at the top of the water fountain. So with the help of two of Golderayce's servants he manages to get into the garden of life at the top and get the healing waters and the plants. But Golderayce finds him, and he has a instant death poisoned dart ready to be shot. Nate manages to delay him until he collapses into dust for not getting the needed water to stop him from becoming dust. Nate heals Eudoxia and then participates in an expedition to The Edge (where the world just ends in a never ending cliff) and then to a mysteriously returned city of Santraphrax which supposedly floated away in the first books. As Nate, Slip, the banderbear... go on the rock with a lot of other people. They see that it is inhabited. But one person who broke away from the group, finds his brother who was lost on a previous expedition. The brother tells him that the place is not inhabited by people but shape-changing Gloamgozers who live off fear and want to take over the world. He takes him to a laboratory where pre-life organisms, glisters, are turned into Gloamgozers. His brother is killed by the explosion when his brother blew it up, but now there can be no more Gloamgozers. Meanwhile, the Gloamgozers reveal themselves and the fact that the floating rock the city is on is being destroyed by a long ago plague of stone sickness where floating rocks no longer float, and that the city too is ruined. Then they begin to feed off the fear of the expeditionaries jumping off the rock to escape. After that it begins to rain the waters of Riverrise which kill the Gloamgozers and heal the rock. The story ends with Nate descending down on an edge expedition and a picture that the drop off the edge is not bottomless.
What I liked, the characters all were very real and well played out. And so were the themes of injustice and greed, and bad things happening to good people. What I didn't like is why they had to add on the Gloamgozers and how the whole healing rain was a sort of Deus Ex Machina. I did think that it was a good end for the series aside from that and enjoyed it very much. Although, as a small note, there are other themes, but they are small and not easy to describe, although they are present in the other books which I do not remember very well.
No comments:
Post a Comment