Review: Dead Country

Dead Country by Max Gladstone
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Gladstone's Craft novels have been hit or miss for me, exhibiting several different flaws, some of which did serious damage to my enjoyment in a couple of cases. This one, for me, was a huge hit, the book that finally fulfilled the potential that the other books hinted at but fell short of. I gave five stars to Three Parts Dead despite vocabulary glitches that were mostly not present in this one, and I happily give this one five stars again. I even gave four stars to Two Serpents Rise despite even more vocab issues and an alienated idiot protagonist, and to Four Roads Cross , despite the frequent absence of the past perfect tense (it's only missing a couple of times in this one); I dropped Full Fathom Five to three stars both because there were too many unmodified references to our world and because I didn't believe the protagonist could solve the story problem. Based on reviews, I haven't read Last First Snow .

There's still an occasional moment here when the secondary fantasy world is too this-worldly, like an office building full of cubicles, but they are fewer and further between. The protagonist is my favourite Craft protagonist, Tara Abernathy (who probably won Four Roads Cross its fourth star, to be honest), and she Granny Weatherwaxes through a tense plot with strong personal stakes, philosophizing with some depth and in beautiful prose about principle versus pragmatism and the dangers of both, without bogging the action down in angst or navel-gazing. The secondary characters are vivid, and all have hooks into Tara that she struggles against, sometimes successfully but other times not so much.

There's plenty of varied action that is never for its own sake, always about something important, and excellently told. I got a clear, strong sense of the threats already abroad in the world and the creeping cosmic threat that was on its way. There was also a resonance with our own society's existential struggles to solve crisis-level problems without making things much worse, and the hopefulness of people of goodwill that, by joining together, they can solve those problems, conveyed clearly without it being too on the nose or in my face and without preaching specific solutions.

The book also doesn't share in the flaw of many popular books being published at the moment of self-consciously and obviously performing the prevailing orthodoxy of this exact moment in history, despite the setting being another world entirely. Sure, there's a gay relationship, and nobody seems to have a problem with it, but it's not spotlighted or commented on. It's just there, in a way that makes sense in the story.

Overall, one of the best books I expect to read this year, an easy entry into the Platinum tier of my annual Best of the Year list, and a contender for my Goodreads Choice fantasy vote (and probably lots of other people's) for 2023.

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