A Succession of Bad Days

Commonweal #2

by Graydon Saunders

Egalitarian heroic fantasy. Experimental magical pedagogy, non-Euclidean ancestry, and some sort of horror from beyond the world.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Magic

529 pages, ebook

First published May 29, 2015

Reviews

[Damien Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are so many reasons I could give why this is not a good book: There's no plot to speak of--things happen, and then it ends. There's no conflict to speak of until the last chapter. Most of the book consists of detailed descriptions of civil engineering projects and the magical techniques used for them. The characters are ludicrously overpowered special snowflakes. The language is nigh-impenetrable, and the innocent comma is tortured beyond all reason.

But you know what? To hell all that. I loved it.

This is a story about where legendary sorcerers come from. Five young people (ages range from late teens to early thirties) with magical talent take part in a highly experimental training program. Talent is hazardous; absent training, none of them are expected to live to see fifty. Traditional training, which runs along the lines of "spend several years sweeping floors and learning control before moving on to lighting candles", has a roughly fifty percent survival rate. Their program, in contrast, starts with completely reconstructing a square mile or so of geography and scales up rapidly from there.

Most of them start out as reasonably normal people. None of them end that way. The story is about how we get from four kids and one respected military veteran to "there came a day when the Goddess of Destruction came to Morning Vale, bringing Death and Strange Mayhem along behind."

Along the way, there's civil engineering. The first third of the book (and this is not a short book) is occupied with the construction of a house. Great attention is paid to foundations, drainage, plumbing, HVAC, and other details that while vitally important to architects rarely play a significant role in fictional entertainment. There's a lot of detail about the magical techniques used: altering reality to get better bedrock, negotiating with fire elementals to build the structure, the proper use of magical gates in plumbing systems, and so forth. As David Weber is to military conflict in space, so is this book to magical engineering projects. This will not be to everyone's taste.

There's a line in the book that describes itself perfectly: "Like a fairy-tale lost in a civil engineering manual."

What saves it for me is the characters. There are some returning favorites from the previous book--I'm particularly fond of Halt, eons-old immortal sorceress, dread spider god, breeder of battle sheep, ceaseless knitter, and wearer of shapeless purple hats. The students introduced here are also a joy. Edgar, our narrator, who goes from "nice kid, but a bit slow" to "scion of the spider god". Chloris, kind and dutiful, terrifying necromancer. I loved hanging out with these people, their camaraderie, and their path to reconciling themselves with what they're becoming.

It's particularly refreshing how sane everyone is. This is Hogwarts without the Slytherins. Not just in the sense that the villains aren't conveniently labeled, but in that there are no villains at all. People get along. They sometimes disagree about methods, but not about goals. Some of the students would really rather be doing something else with their life than turning into a demigod, but none want to run off and become a dark lord or skip class to play Quidditch.

As I said, I loved it. I can't wait for the next book, and I hope Saunders keeps this up for a good long time to come.

[FeepingCreature · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book lies at the intersection of three topics of influence.

The first is Magic, but not the kind of magic that works despite physics saying that it should. This is magic that is clearly deeply integrated in the physical laws of their world, and works with them instead of against them. Transhumanists will also appreciate the ideas set forth in the book - to them, I can sell this book in one sentence: part of the process of becoming a mage is that you literally upload your brain into magic. This process is interactive and explored at length.

The second is Engineering. If you like competence porn, this is the book for you. The characters, over the course of the book, engage in an escalating series of civil-improvement projects that make good use of their specializations, and for those who enjoy competent characters becoming better at their chosen skills these segments will be a joy to read.

The third, of course, is Friendship. It may not be immediately obvious how this fits into the sequence of topics described so far, but the characters, partially due to the tight mental integration that is inevitable in their brand of magic, very quickly become very comfortable with each others' presence. Romance is a thing here, but mostly .. how to explain this. Do you know the feeling when you are hanging out somewhere talking with people who are doing what you are doing or at least things that interest you, who are competent, friendly, and both safe and exciting to be around? This book has that. This book has that a lot. And it is wonderful.

If any of those three sound appealing to you, you should give this book a try. If all of those three sound appealing to you, you are in for a true treat.

[Dani · Rating 5 out of 5]

"For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like". I loved it, but my advice to friends has been to read the prequel ("The March North", which is also shorter and more-accessible), and if they enjoy it, they will enjoy this book considerably more. If they didn't enjoy it, well, this may not be the sort of thing they like.

The word-building is special. Take our world, add magic, and let a quarter of a million years go by. The received wisdom in this world is that the average Dark Overlord lasts a century or two before being replaced or getting too cocky or just slipping on a banana peel. That's a lot of Dark Overlords, and most of them had rotten judgment about the ecological consequences of unleashing hordes of monsters or dark enchantments or plagues or demons. After a quarter of a million years of this, human life is precarious. Scientific understanding is at least as advanced as ours (there are pragmatic restrictions on technology, somewhat balanced by availability of non-sorcerer-level magic), but populations are low, and next year's harvest is not a sure thing. ('Weeding' is the responsibility of elite combat teams.)

The plot follows a team of five student sorcerers. As a story, it shouldn't work - hundreds of pages of lovingly-detailed descriptions of building and excavating and synthesizing - but it does. The novel is centered on the student sorcerers, but what makes it work is our peripheral view of the world in which the novel is embedded. The reader has to work for it. Said periphery is very dense, but the world-building stays on the periphery because the narrator takes it for granted, or doesn't notice it. (This is a welcome change from the traditional twenty-page expositions.)

There are several levels of world-building. There is the picture-by-implication of a world that's had too much time for too many irresponsible magicians. There is the Commonweel - a society that is trying to survive without sorcerous overlords - and does not have good odds of succeeding. There is a bigger picture - barely visible here, more visible in the third book, "Safely You Deliver". The bigger picture *should* be barely visible: From the narrator's viewpoint even the second level, with the Commonweel under attack from monsters in one direction and from enemy sorcerers in another direction, is a background to the immediate problems of getting out of sorcerous training alive.

[Sineala · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somehow I missed hearing that a sequel to The March North had come out until about last month, and then I had to rush to Google Books to buy it. And then it took me about a month to actually finish it, because (a) it is really good, (b) it is really dense, and (c) I didn't want it to be over. I really liked the first book, and this is... even better.

I seem to have a fondness for the kinds of books that get described as "this will probably be someone's favorite book, but not yours," if only because I end up spitefully going after them yelling OH YEAH IT CAN BE MY FAVORITE BOOK, JUST WATCH ME. And this is... well, "sorcery school but sorcery school is basically training as a civil engineer, only with magic," which I acknowledge is kind of a hard sell. (There's also still no gendered pronouns! I understand this is trendy in SF, and that reminds me I need to finish reading Imperial Radch someday.)

This series (and this book, I think, more than the first) feels like the upper division courses of fantasy novels. The graduate seminar of fantasy novels. Like the author must have -- and I don't know if this is true, because all I know of the author is from my vague memories of lurking on rec.arts.sf.* back in the day -- anyway, like the author must have spent years reading EVERYTHING and worldbuilding it all out and planning how to write something that would avoid generic fantasy pitfalls x, y, and z. (Although honestly if Book 3 -- please say there is a book 3 coming -- is about a plucky young farmboy who finds a Magic Sword and has to go on a quest with a band of dashing rogues, I would still read it because I am sure this version of it would be amazing.)

Basically, everything just works, and man, I love let's-learn-magic novels, and all the characters were great. A+, would read again.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Succession of Bad Days is Saunders' take on wizard school. Given the centrality of magic to the setting of the Commonweal, wizard school should be fascinating and important. Unfortunately, this book smacks hard against not only the limits of Saunders' idiosyncratic style, but also against something deep in the genre.

But first, the general review. After the events in The March North, five young people have been selected for an experimental new program of magical training. Mastering the Power in the world of the Commonweal typically has to be started when a person is very young, and due to various circumstances, all of characters are at least 18. It's a statistical certainty that if left to their own devices or started on the conventional curriculum, they'd be dead in years, a key fact which convinces the very cautious Commonweal ethical review board.

So our narrator, Edgar, along with old friend Dove (former Line sergeant) and new friends Zora and Chloris and Kyndfrid go under the not-so-gentle hands of Halt, Wake, and Blossom to learn how to do magic. While the standard method of sorcerous training involve learning delicate balances of the Power to avoid cooking your brain, the new method involves collectively working outside yourself. The Power is a metaphor for interacting with reality, and meta-reality, and also just thinking through physics. Edgar's first trick is carrying objects by wrapping them in a "gravity sock" and lifting them around, starting with pails of water and moving up to whole builds and thousand-ton chunks of rocks.

A lot of the book is devoted to engineering. Hundreds of pages on how the group engineers their wizard school, which is sorcerously crafted by a fire elemental with some expected fine touches, like a domed ceiling with millions of stars made of precious metals showing the exact state of the sky at the moment the elemental was summoned, but also less standard features like quadruple-paned sapphire picture windows, portals between the toilets and the septic tank, and a basement full of pure titanium ingots. There's a similarly lengthy chapter on building a canal. You know what you're signing up for.

The second major thread is the human interacts between the students. They have a consonance with each other, a telepathic bond that lets them share power and speak in creepy unison. Edgar and Dove have more than consonance; they wind up sharing one metaphysical mind, which is the key learning of sorcery, and spend a lot of time cuddling with each other. This is described with a lot of intimacy and zero romance.

The main drama of the book centers around the dangers that the students present, closing with a "trial for your life" in front of the Commonweal Parliament. They're powerful and useful. It's revealed that the basic problem in the Commonweal is weeding, keeping farmland clear of various buried magically altered biological threats which can kill thousands of people in gruesome ways. Sterilizing land is easy; the Line can do that, but dirt melted into safe glass is useless for living on. Chloris, a necromancer, can reach out for thousands of square kilometers a day and precisely kill only the weeds, leaving the rest of the ecosystem in place. Zora is a life mage and powerful healer. Dove has the making of a militant enchanter. And Edgar is one of whatever Halt is, and Halt scares everyone. And either by chance of new training methods, individually they're top 10 powerful wizards in the Commonweal, and collectively top 3. But they're also raw, barely trained, barely constrained by the Shape of Peace, and for all of their good intentions, a nuclear bomb buried underneath the safety of the Commonweal.

The thing that knocks this down for me is that this is about Saunders' vision of magic, which appears to be mostly about manipulating physical processes by will alone. It's super cool to just think about things like anti-gravity, pulling landscapes from alternate pasts, using Maxwell's Demon at scale to sort atoms into macroscale items, or violating thermodynamics to turn random chunks of air into lasers and then dump lethal waste heat into nearby lakes. The Commonweal has a surprisingly solid understanding of physics, for all they don't seem to use gunpowder or electricity.

But there's also another type of magic, which seems to work on some universal language, demarcated in funky gothic type 𝕿𝖍𝖔𝖚 𝖜𝖎𝖑𝖑 𝖔𝖇𝖊𝖞 𝖒𝖞 𝖜𝖎𝖑𝖑, and while Edgar can do that, that kind of magic is substantially under-examined. As Ted Chiang so keenly put it, "Magic is evidence that the universe knows that you’re a person. Magic is an indication that the universe recognizes that people are different from things and that you are an individual who is different from other people." The Commonweal setting is so relentless materialistic and mechanical in its basic premise that it's hard to fit magic, the idea that some people are special, into both Saunders' intellectual framework and the laws of the Commonweal, which explicitly say "special people are an abomination".

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Succession of Bad Days shares some characters and the setting with The March North, and picks up, timeline-wise, not long after the end of the previous book. Both books are reasonably self-contained and stand on their own, but reading in publication order seems advisable (a number of things will be easier to understand and more meaningful that way).

This is a (to borrow the phrase the author's blog) "go-to-sorcerer-school" book, but it manages to avoid retreading tired old ground in a number of ways. Another Hogwarts or Brakebills, this is not.

Some of this is due to the nature of magic (the Power) and attitudes toward magic users in the Commonweal series. Some is due to the particular circumstances of the students in question, and the unconventional approach to their education. The end result is highly enjoyable and also explores more of the world of the Commonweal after the events of the first book.

I'm looking forward to further books in this series.

[Philonous · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a bit sad. There's so much potential, so much to love; the characters are likeable and interesting, the world-building is fantastic. there's a real sense of immersion and wonder. But the book just doesn't _go_ anywhere with it. The characters become students, learn, become stronger. And then it ends. No conflict to speak of, no actual plot. No opportunity for the characters to prove themselves. No hurdles to overcome or hard decisions to make. Everything is just handed to them, including the connection between Dove and Edgar: a relationship that requires no work nor trust.
Even from a pure wish-fullfilment perspective, this is bland fare.

[rixx · Rating 5 out of 5]

Following *The March North* is not easy in any way, and yet, Saunders manages. Same world, directly after the events of the first book – but in a completely different role, keeping only side characters around. I'm very into this sort of continuity. Especially when it gives me civil engineering Hogwarts for severely overpowered magic users. Hell yes. The book sums it up best: "like a fairy-tale lost in a civil engineering manual."

It turns out that Saunders' opaque dense style of writing wasn't a character voice, it's just how he writes – though he does manage to come up with a good reason, at least for this book: Our protagonist is unlocking his full potential, and thus starts thinking differently and like other wizards – fair enough.

Saunders continues to flesh out the world by his signature combination of oblique hints and pseudo-formal descriptions – pandas that are "preferentially anthropophagic".

What it comes down to, though, is a love declaration to civil engineering. If you're not into that, tough luck: Our magic users start being useful by crafting small useful items as well as altering the landscape. None of this is trivial and I have learnt more than I ever expected to about canals and locks.

But at the same time, there is some very cool group consciousness and self-modification stuff going on, including a look at the consequences, which is unusual. You *sometimes* get authors considering the ethical consequences, if rarely, but you basically never see authors discuss society-wide consequences of powerful magic or self-modification. Hot stuff.

Plus, there is romance if the weirdest, most wonderful kind. Several successful relationships, in fact, none of them standard in any way. Money quote: "The rule is no other women when I’m male, and anything I like otherwise."

This is also the first time we get a bit of a look at gender and sexuality in the Commonweal, with an overarching theme of "it depends and it's complicated". Lovely, and completely sidelined so that you have to pay attention to things like "who uses which pronouns in which situation towards whom" to keep up.

[Andy H.]

Started slow and dense and took me a long time in the background of other things, before blossoming into something marvelous about halfway through. This is the second in a series about what might be the only relatively safe and democratic place to live in a world whose ecology has been warped by magic and whose politics have been dominated by conflicts between tyrannical wizards for hundreds of thousands of years. The first book was about going to war with the kinds of magical and social technologies you need to secure a place like that against whatever terrors want in; this one is about finding more or less prosocial ways to learn to be a wizard in community, in a universe where that's a bit like finding an ethical way to be an exposed nuclear reactor.

I'm glad these books exist. They're triumphs of worldbuilding that make no attempt whatsoever to ease the reader in, weird and inaccessible in a way that would be difficult to pitch to a wide audience but is easily beloved by a narrow one (and I'm counting myself in the latter group even though I'm not sure I followed more than two thirds of the dialogue) -- an excellent fit, in other words, for internet self publishing.

[Billy Rubin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Forget all its flaws (the lack of plot, the lack of narrative clarity at times, the typos), this book was an arresting read for me. It captures the imagination, and doesn't let go. Great characterization as well, really fleshes out some characters introduced in The March North

(Also best wizard school story I've read, but that doesn't count for much)

[David Tate · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hard to explain exactly why I love this book so much.

I have been reading fantasy for 40+ years now. I have read any number of "learning to be a mage" stories, from James Schmitz to Patricia McKillip to Caroline Stevermer to Anne McCaffrey to Susan Cooper to P. C. Hodgell to Diana Wynne Jones to J. K. Rowling. This one is special. I liked The March North a lot; I really loved A Succession of Bad Days.

My high school English teacher would classify this one as "Man against nature", but that's too simplistic. Yes, the primary conflict is that our group of youngish protagonists will surely die, through no fault of their own, without extraordinary intervention (and luck) on the part of the Independent mages of the Second Commonweal. The setting, though -- the setting makes it so much more. My English teacher didn't have a category for "some people against the rest of society for their own good, with nature fighting the whole thing".

Imagine that recorded history goes back tens of thousands of years, perhaps more. And it consists almost entirely of "a succession of bad days", in which one megalomaniac sorcerer after another establishes a god-king autocracy and enslaves (and alters) the populace. Until one unlikely sorcerer figures out a way to break the cycle, at least locally. The result is The Commonweal -- a communist polity in which all work for the common good, including the powerful Independent sorcerers. Or, at least, those who chose to submit to the new system, rather than be destroyed or banished.

This is the context in which our protagonists are attempting to become mighty wizards. (They have no choice; if they fail to train their talents, they will surely fry their own brains accidentally.) Even if they succeed at wizardry, they might still fail at social integration, and be destroyed. In a society where claims of special privilege are anathema, godlike powers are an uncomfortable fit at best.

None of this touches on the amazing coolness of the learning journey of the students, the thoughtful elaboration of the magical system, the astonishing originality of the political structure, the vast detail of civil engineering feats, the slowly revealed depth of history, the even slower discovery of how familiar words don't mean quite what you thought they did, and the distinct and moving personal quirks of the students. Oh, and the dozens of individual sentences that had me snorting or laughing out loud as I read. And I haven't even mentioned the biggest plot twist of all regarding our viewpoint character; you can have that one for free when you read it.

[Bryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Experimental magical pedagogy is absolutely the best in all ways!

To use more words, I absolutely loved this book and I am so at a loss to describe it. There is an egalitarian society that has very strict rules about people using magic because people with great magical power tend to destroy egalitarianism overnight, and it has a variety of interesting characters of different ages who are working together to learn how to control their magic as quickly as possible before the magic ends up destroying them, and it has a lot of really delicious concrete detail about the ways that they are learning and the things that they are doing and how they are connecting (or not) with one another and with their various mentors, and really fascinating emotional struggles as they come to terms with the fact that if they survive they are going to have very, very, very different lives than they expected and will have a hard time fitting into their egalitarian society in the way that their childhoods shaped them to desire.

There, that is a try at it; it was so much my thing that it is really hard to talk about why I loved it. The characters read as very real to me, but also sometimes quite oblique, just like real people, because they are coming from their own cultural background which is this fascinating fantasy world and Saunders does not spell everything out, he lets the reader put it together and make connections and feel for themselves. That in itself would be enough to charm me, but also, it just hit me so deeply in my own self -- as a human being raising children, my life everyday involves compromises of experience and questions of identity and trying to figure out how to use the power I have ethically and how all of that mixes with love and the need for intimacy, and so many things in this book spoke to these questions such that I felt very, very seen, even though of course it is a book and not about me myself at all. Still, it is something extremely rare, to feel like a book sees me in the things about myself that are least common, and so I loved it for that intersection of the words and my life, as well as for the words itself.

May 2021: Yes, even better on rereading, because I understood so much more about the world & the stakes. The first time through I was really invested in the outcome of a particular relationship; this time I knew what was happening with that so I was able to enjoy the details & engage more with other characters, which is a great place to be moving into the third book!

[Scott Belisle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can see where some of the complaints about plot (or lack of plot) came from. This is definitely not a book for everyone. It is obscurely written, lacking almost entirely in world-building outside of that which grows naturally from the the dialogue and scenes, and for some people might be boring to boot. I think there's a review that describes it as something like a series of civil engineering projects, with magic!

And, well, they're not wrong. But there's also philosophy here, about living with people who are different from you, who have power over you. It's about how to build a society such that you can trust in the custom and law of the land to keep those people with absolute power from exercising it, except in self-defense or defense of the whole. And there is a lot here about characters, learning how to build a new image of themselves when they discover that their old image no longer fits. I found it fascinating, and I think the commonweal is an endlessly interesting world to visit. I am almost afraid to read the next book, because I know the fourth has been delayed more or less indefinitely, and I can't bear the thought of not knowing where things go, after "Safely you Deliver."

[Walter Underwood · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't understand why this book was written. It doesn't do anything and it doesn't go anywhere. Maybe he needs it for the next book, but if so, it should have been a novella.

Perhaps is should have been called "A Succession of Chapters". There is no real plot. No real character development. One big victory is things ending up the same as they were. It is kind of interesting but not really rewarding. You learn a lot more about the history of the place.

There is a big reveal, but it isn't possible for the reader to figure it out by being engaged with the narrative. The author hides it from you, then reveals it. That made me not care very much.

There is the usual contorted grammar. When I have to stop and reread a sentence three or four times to figure it out, that is not helping me enjoy the book.

At least he drops the annoying habit of explaining things 50 pages after you need to know them. That made "The March North" an unnecessarily tiring read.

In fact, enough is explained, that I might recommend reading this first, then "The March North" as a prequel. This book is not very spoilery if read in that order. Which hints at how much it just doesn't contribute to the series.

[Jeff Youngstrom · Rating 5 out of 5]

In large part, this is a 600-page training montage as a team of apprentice sorcerer engineers begin to learn the skills of their trade. And it is So. Much. Fun.

It's also a deep philosophical examination of the utopian society Saunders has built where coercion and other forms of inter-personal violence are absolutely forbidden.

Pure catnip.

[summervale1 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another fantastic book by Graydon Saunders, about learning magic and high concept civil engineering.

[Betawolf · Rating 4 out of 5]

I eventually settled on four stars for the adventurous and partially-intentionally challenging nature of the book as a whole. Unlike _The March North_, though, where I was tending towards five stars, this was nearly a three.

The plot is basically nonexistent. Or it's a really extreme bildungsroman, I can't quite make my mind up. The majority of events are the group of sorcerer-apprentices moving around the landscape, or moving the landscape around. Sometimes they manipulate probability in an area. Sometimes they kill weeds. It's a bunch of problem-solving stuff. Which would be a fantastic, if niche, as something to watch. But the system they use to solve problems isn't a system. It's not even principles of a system. The entire conceit of the learning process is that the apprentices are _making up the rules_ at the same time as they are learning the rules. This is certainly... ethereal, and very defiantly magical, but doesn't really _work_ as backdrop when you're faced with 'how do we solve this problem' setups. You can't follow their process -- the bit of those sorts of setups that make them _fun_ -- because they have no predictable process. At one point the main character just starts telling things to do things in a command-language never mentioned before. That's not even the least of it.

Anyway, the development of the characters is somewhat of a stand-in for, well, plot. The characters are all a little sickly-sweet and self-effacing and self-sacrificing, which combines with their continually-reinforced general awesomeness to become a little tiresome. I think the idea is that you enjoy watching them win, much like the competence parts of _The March North_, but again the lack of any sort of handle on their limitations makes this hard. The things they do are still interesting, but it's like watching Dumbledore do stage magic.

All of that is to be wrapped in a caveat of 'so far as I understand the text'. Because, okay, Saunders has managed to get the actual structure of individual sentences down into some kind of consistent and mortally-comprehensible scheme. That is certainly a point of improvement over _The March North_ -- each sentence on its own is quite readable. Stringing them together, however, still produces horrible headaches at times. The entire book, or near enough, seems to be a sort of stream of consciousness. That doesn't sound so bad, except when you realise that much of the book contains long, involved descriptions of technical operations and changes to structures that the character -- let alone the reader -- necessarily understands very little about. These are also presented as a stream of consciousness, mostly without any explanation of the intent or significance. These are meshed in with ongoing, rambling conversations between the characters, wherein you have to really mine out the subtext to form the connection between apparently nonsequitorial utterances being made by speakers that mostly just read each others' minds.

All of which makes for a challenging read. To make sure you're not falling asleep, Saunders throws in the usual smattering of obscure (as well as fantastical) terminology, and will toss you into the section where the apprentices build a canal by assuming that you already have a solid background in hydrology and geological surveying, and are perfectly comfortable holding in your head the vaguely-described geography of an area covering multiple lakes, ridges, creeks and streams whilst following a stream of consciousness about magically carving up a canal system that includes magic teleportation gates (which, I don't know why those can't stand in for the entire canal system).

Finally, you can never quite trust that what you're reading is just hard. There were a few obvious errors ('for awhile') which grated, but not as much as the occasional befuddling passages which turned out to be befuddling because under no reading, including archaic definitions, did they actually contain sense, and there were actually some dropped or mis-corrected words. It's tough when you have to dredge a passage or exchange for the intent, it's tougher when you find that it was just an error.

This was a struggle. I wanted to like the book. I think I did, on balance, for entirely niche reasons. I hope nobody, including Saunders, writes another book like this.

[Justus · Rating 2 out of 5]

The predecessor, The March North, was easily the most opaque and confusing fantasy book I've ever read. Maybe not as impossible to understand as Ulysses (which I bailed from after just 2-3 pages) but still. It throws you neck deep in a world that is very different from our own and explains absolutely nothing. It is packed full of action that is often written in a very elliptical style. There were several parts I had to reread several times just to get a vague idea of what had happened. Extremely important details about characters are brief parentheticals hundreds of pages in.

It was full of action, which helped pull you forward even if you weren't really sure exactly what was happening. And it was interesting in an intellectually intriguing kind of way. The author has thought deeply about what magic in a world would really be like and decided it isn't "just like our but there are a few dozen wizards who mostly sit around doing not much". It is strange and bizarre in a speculative science fiction kind of way.

I was curious to see if the second book in the series would be less whiplash inducing now that I had a vague idea what was going on. And...it is. It is definitely easier to follow what is going on this time around.

It is just all dreadfully boring with no one you care about. Saunders wasn't especially adept with character work the first time around and he's not really any better here. But the main problem is he seems to have taken one look at Harry Potter and decided "what if I wrote about a 'realistic' magic school without all the tropes". You know, bullies, children inexplicably put in life & death situations, constant absence of any adult figures, the other teacher who inexplicably hates the protagonist, and so on. (All these tropes are repeated in things like Mark Lawrence's Red Sister series.)

The problem is...all of those tropes are there to add some drama and tension. Saunders gives us a magic school without the tropes but also without any real drama or tension. Everyone -- students and teachers alike -- are decent people. The students get a series of increasingly challenging homework assignments.

I checked out after about 1/3rd of the book because it didn't seem to be going anywhere and none of the characters were interesting or memorable. From reading reviews of this and other books in the series it feels like Saunders is going through an intellectual exercise -- which will definitely appeal to a very very small number of people -- more than anything else. It is almost astonishing how little seems to happen.

[Nick Fagerlund · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Reviewed as a unit with Safely You Deliver.)

Sequels to The March North, with a mostly different cast. (A secondary character from the first book is one of the five or six protagonists here.) Extremely odd, and pretty good.

There might be more of these on the way, but they aren't heavy on series-scope plotting, so it's not your classic "why'd you tell me to read this unfinished series (you fucker)" experience. Each book has a more or less complete plot of its own... sort of.

By which I mean, they don't even really have a book-scope plot, per se. They're highly episodic (not a lot of chapter-to-chapter cliffhangers), and I think they're sort of Saunders's take on some Wizard School tropes, except it's more like a Wizard Homeschool Cooperative for Adult Learners. They're all about a leisurely build of interest and intrigue around the protagonists' gradual leveling-up, and a problem-by-problem exploration of how this world and country actually work (or don't). There IS an overarching story of pretty massive scale, but it's told in the interstices, while we focus on a handful of high-talent/low-experience magic users trying to reach a certain heroic level of competence before they accidentally detonate themselves or something. Plus weird public works problem solving that usually somehow involves metallurgy and extreme materials engineering.

I had a great time with these, but I'm having a hard time saying whether you'd be into them; they really are quite odd and imperfect. But The March North stands pretty well on its own (and is priced as a loss-leader), so I guess read that and see if you're into the style and the setting; if you dig them enough to be interested in a less plot-heavy wander, and want to hear more about what's up with Blossom and Halt and that random unicorn gal who shows up at the end, keep going.

Re: recent-ish discussions of format, wow, this is the odd instance of that back-heavy trilogy thing that I'm totally OK with.

[Kynan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Succession of Bad Days is not so much a sequel to The March North, as another story set after the events therein but with new locales and characters.

This time around the story feels like it's setting up for something bigger. We join a somewhat disparate bunch of kids as they begin their, in some cases unexpected, journey into the sorcerous-arm of the Commonweal.

I'm really enjoying the "journey of discovery" that these books imply so, if you've not read it yet, stop now! If you enjoyed The March North then definitely read on, if you didn't, this is more of the same so...maybe find something else?

I found A Succession of Bad Days to be significantly more penetrable than The March North, but the general style and content remains consistently intriguing and interesting! I was initially disappointed not to rejoin the (surviving) folks from The March North, but that quickly dissipated in my interest in learning about the characters that populate this story!

I have to admit that, coming out of The March North, I felt a little like I'd been challenged, and found a little wanting. I had an idea of what the world these stories are set in looked like, a little idea how some of the social groups operated, but I'd not be well placed to write the Lonely Planet guide to the Commonweal. Generally,  my interest in doing some amateur detective work had been well and truly piqued. There's no lack of detail in these books, but there's an utter lack of introduction to even the most complex of concepts in this world. It's led to me having quite the surfeit of notes as I try to piece things together. I was abnormally excited to spot an aurochs relatively early in the book - a link to earth?! I took embarrassingly copious notes on the passage of time, working out that a "décade" was approximately "12ish days" (I know, the clue's in the name...) and writing...rest of the review went missing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Janice · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I like about this book:

The characters: Crazy powerful sorcerers who are trying to learn how to LIVE as crazy powerful sorcerers without dying young, or destroying a lot of stuff around them. And to learn how to still live in human society when they've probably grown beyond being totally human.

The society: This society has worked out a way to live with crazy powerful sorcerers or wizards. The Shape of Peace (as I understand it) is a pretty powerful tool in the hands of non-sorcerous people. And there's the Line (an army/fighting force) which helps enforce the rules. Also a Parliament.

The Magic: There is a LOT of power available to be wielded by some. This is both good and bad.

What I liked less: Honestly, I didn't always know what was going on. I read it in short bits, a chapter or two at a time. The author's style of writing is unusual and a bit elliptical. I generally got the gist of what was going on, but at some point, I'll probably go back through it again and see if I can glean a little more of the meaning.

Note: there are long, detailed descriptions of how to make armor, a house, and a long canal with magic. Also how to get rid of a deadly infection with magic.

I'd say not for everyone, but if you're curious and patient, read Graydon's books.

[Dare Talvitie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked The March North. However, this sort-of-sequel I really didn't.

The main problem was the undynamic plot. This is a book, where there's hardly any conflict; it is just about sorcerous apprentices working on various projects. The worldbuilding is kind of interesting, but it is so obtuse that often it was a chore to keep reading.

The lack of plot tied to the second problem: the stream-of-consciousness writing style. I couldn't help but hear the rambling back-and-forth style "it's this, not this, something else" mannerisms in the voice of Donald Trump in my head. I'm not sure if March North was written in the same style. Maybe it was, but I could ignore it because I was really interested in what was going on.

The very end was kind of interesting and the world is still really unique, and I approve of what the author is trying to do here, but this is one of the weakest three stars I've ever given. I still want to check out the other books in the series, however.

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very enjoyable read. As others have noted, there isn't much in the way of plot or conflict, the narrative is pure character development and culture study in a fascinating setting. The writing is very dense and it can be difficult to parse at times. The characters were excellent, I found the magic really creative and fascinating in a way that Harry Potter-style magic is not. If you enjoyed the March North you'll enjoy this too.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is incredible. The closest comparison I can think of are Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic books, but this is more adult and wayyy wilder. Somehow a book involving phenomenal cosmic powers, manages to not have much direct conflict and stays super focused on the characters involved.

[Beth Friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about the making of Independents (overpowered sorcerers) from the point of view of one of them. The writing style is idiosyncratic, and the plot is minimal, but I nevertheless enjoyed it. Three and a half stars, rounded up.

[Jesse C · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite of his books, so far. Yes, there is an almost hundred page digression into the engineering aspects of canal building in the middle of the books. It is still fantastic.

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars, but the catch is you have to really be down with your fantasy novel actually being a civil engineering manual in disguise.

[subzero · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the most interesting civil engineering book I've ever read. I will read the whole trilogy

[Finn]

DNF.

I tried, man, I really did. I'm just not strong enough. I knew I was in trouble when they started talking about graphs of magic talent distribution.

[Todd · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a fast read of a book. The writing is extremely convoluted at times, written in a very informal, stream-of-consciousness/colloquial manner. This is not a plot-driven book. There are maybe three(?) "action" scenes (action-like, really). This book is primarily about world-building (excellent magic system, very interesting culture and government, even the terrain is interesting), about character, about what it means to be a person (vs. human) and a useful part of society, and what society owes to its citizens and visa versa.

Very little of that sounds good on paper to me, but it's the best thing I've read all year. As slow-going as it was, I was happy to saunter along with it. A couple parts really stretched out too much for me:

The building of the canal system, with the locks and dams - I know nothing about the subject and spent a lot of time confused. Though even there - the walking forest!


Magic in Saunders' world fits right in there with physics, chemistry, ecology, biology... I can't tell if the Commonweal has a great public education system or if magic users simply understand these things inherently (I think it's a bit of both).

Ultimately, "A Succession of Bad Days" is about five apprentice wizards, all of whom have enough talent that, were they to be left untrained, they would, statistically speaking, definitely be dead within a few decades (10s of years, to clarify for those who've read within this world). It follows their training and some tasks they complete for the good of the Commonweal. Readers of "The Long March North" will be stoked to note the return of Blossom, Halt (my personal favorite), and the Standard-Captain (though in a much smaller role).

I have a lot more to say about this book, but it all flies out of my head when I try to write it down. Find me at a bar somewhere and ask me if I've read any good books lately, and I'm sure I'll talk your ear off.