I am continuing my re-reading of the Cassan Astor series and I’ve just finished re-reading book 3, Cassan Astor and the Immortal King! We’re getting into the more recent books, so this one is a bit more fresh on my mind, but it is fun to read through it now having gone organically from book 1 and book 2 and now into this.

So… what did I think?

This book introduces a lot of characters and the scope opens up much more. We also start to see the “master plan” eluded to in the first two books finally take shape (that is, when the Harbinger and his agents begin their war to weaken the empire).

As I’ve said with the first two books in the series, I’ve been impressed by how well the narrative holds together. The pacing is solid. The story is compelling. It doesn’t go too fast or too slow. And it ends where it needs to.

There were some details that I forgot about until re-reading this. For example, I’d forgotten that Meggy had a brother who died. I also forgot that General Radish left the empress’s court so quickly. I thought he’d stayed longer.

The “master plan” coming together feels very organic and planned, having come off the first two books. The seeds are well planted for this to come together. There are sprinkles throughout this book (and the previous books) that all seem well placed and well peppered for when the Harbinger’s uprising happens about 2/3 way through the book.

That also is the point where… it gets really wordy.

Now, this is interesting. When this book was in the proof-reading stages, it got a lot of compliments on the longer, paragraph-heavy, detail-laden sections. I recall notes from at least two people highlighting some of the wordier bits and giving compliments. And, of course, when you see this book all the time and look at it as much as I did, it can sometimes be difficult to see everything as a whole, so I rely on this helpful feedback from others.

But now that I’m reading it again after taking a break… well… I don’t prefer it.

Thankfully, most of the book is not written this way, but somewhere around maybe between the half-way point to the 3/4 point, the book gets really wordy. There are either too many sentences saying the same things or similar things. Or the sentences themselves are overly complicated and littered with too many adjectives. In my opinion, it slows the pace of the book a bit, breaks up the flow a bit, and takes me out of it.

Now, I have to keep in mind, I’m approaching this with a very critical eye and, based on the feedback from proof-readers, other people seem to like this more “wordy” approach. So who really knows if it’s as annoying to others as it is to me? But for now, I’m inclined to say the wordiness jumped out at me and I didn’t prefer it.

That said, the writing style gets a bit more “normal” during the last few chapters and starts to flow again with that typical flow it starts off with. So it ends on a strong note, but has a weird early second half.

Of the three books in the series, I still think Sea of Krakens might be my favorite. The writing style in Sea of Krakens is consistently strong, the pace is great, and the scope is narrow enough to not get too overly complicated. But Immortal King lays the ground for a lot of future events to come later in the series.

This is probably my second-favorite of the three.

This time, I caught seven typos. So I’ll have to go back in and update those. One typo in particular, I am stunned no one brought up so far, not even a customer in a review. A character literally says the nonsense phrase “Yest char,” to someone. How was that not caught?? In any case, I should make those updates and have that changed by the end of the week.

Until next time!