Review: Kingdoms of the Cursed: The High and Faraway, Book Two

Kingdoms of the Cursed: The High and Faraway, Book Two by Greg Keyes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read the first in the series, and enjoyed it enough that when I saw this one on Netgalley I asked for a copy for review. I did have some hesitations; I felt the first one had pumped the archetypes pedal a bit too hard, at the expense of more subtle character development.

This one doesn't feel as overdone in the archetypes department, but it does feel disjointed to me. This is partly because, rather than being together as they were in most of the first book, the three viewpoint characters spend most of this second book widely separated, having their own adventures, which don't always seem to be particularly directed at a shared goal. Most of the time, they're trying to survive, and/or find each other, but they're also trying to rescue various people, with mixed success. This gives plenty of opportunities to leave one character at a cliffhanger and switch to another, but I sometimes found that by the time the viewpoint switched back I'd forgotten the earlier character's situation - a sign that the plot wasn't coherent and cohesive enough, I think. Several of the key characters who recurred from the earlier book were ones I didn't remember at all, too. The book does open with a rather on-the-nose as-you-know-Bob recap, addressed by one character to her diary, which at least reminded me who these people were and why they were fighting; it could have been done a lot more subtly, but it achieved the purpose.

Aster, the young sorceress, spends a lot of the book confused, lacking in confidence and direction, and, for a while, very vulnerable. Veronica, the semi-undead girl trying not to be a monster, has probably the strongest arc, one that leaves her boyfriend, Errol, the third viewpoint character, rather high and dry by the end. He's... susceptible to damsels in distress, and by the end, Veronica isn't in distress. She has her own thing going on, though it wasn't completely clear to me (maybe even to her) exactly what that is.

Errol... I wasn't quite sure what was going on with him either. He had to find his courage; he certainly found reasons to live (having ended up involved in the adventure indirectly because of a suicide attempt back before the start of Book 1). But the whole thing was so muddied by a lot of wandering about in wonder-filled but inconclusive directions that I spent a lot of the book just waiting for clarity that never really emerged.

This isn't at all a rules-based fantasy universe, by the way. It's more at the mythic end. Parts of the world (multiverse?) are always stuck at particular times of day or night; all the adults are statues, or monsters, or disappeared (though there seems to be a fairly wide latitude in the definition of "adult"); nobody seems to have to eat or engage in agriculture, which is just as well, given that there's no day in some places, no night in others, and weather seems to be just as arbitrary and unvarying. Ships fly for no readily apparent reason and without an obvious mechanism. It's a dreamlike world, reminiscent of Peter Pan's Neverland in many ways, and while that is wonderful in a sensawunda kind of way, it doesn't help with making sense of what is going on.

I will give it four stars, with some slight reluctance, because it is filled with unexpected wonders, but it would be more compelling if the plot was tighter and the characters were more goal-directed.

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