I never actually wrote a review of The Mask of Mirrors by M. A. Carrick (which is the combined forces of Alyc Helms and Marie Brennan), but I loved it. It gave us a beautifully crafted, complex world of multi-layered, multi-cultural politics and religion in a city of divided loyalties and magics. It gave me characters I instantly adored. A con plot I didn’t hate, even. I got a sequel within 12 months of the first book’s release. And I loved even more that that sequel didn’t seem to suffer from middle of trilogy syndrome. Truly, we were blessed.
Alas, this was clearly all going too well to last all the way to book three.
To be clear, Labyrinth’s Heart, the conclusion of the Rook and Rose trilogy, is still good. I still gave it four stars. I still devoured the book within days of receiving it from pre-order… but… but. It’s just not quite on the same level as the other two. And much like with Guy Gavriel Kay books and bread, while all of them may be wonderful when compared to other books (or foodstuffs), when you get one that doesn’t quiiiiite live up to what you expect, the sadness feels all the more distressing than if it had been any other series. Or food. Ok I’ll abandon the metaphor.
It’s rare to say it, but coming to the end of Labyrinth’s Heart, I almost thought the books would have been better as a quartet than a trilogy – possibly because The Liar’s Knot was so well managed and without raggedy bits doing the work for payoff later, the third book had to take all the strain of grasping all the threads and pulling them tight*. This mainly means that the middle third of the book feels like a desperate scramble here and there, with minor characters from previous books popping up to finish this subplot off, or be someone needed to repay a debt that allows something that has to happen to happen, or just making sure we remember that this is a vastly peopled city full of various competing desires and cultural mores. By the end, it does all come together. All of those threads mean something, they’re all there for a reason, they all lead to the ultimate purpose, or emotional climax or what have you. But the process of laying them all out has been truncated into a third of a book, and so it does feel rushed. And, more importantly, confusing.
Because this is a series with a lot of people and moving parts – to make this city so richly cultured and real-feeling, that meant depth. Depth means characters with different perspectives. Lots of them. We need to see the world of the upper class Liganti, as well as the indigenous Vraszenian clans and the other people who call Nadežra home but are bound to neither group, or both. We need to see that none of those groups is a monolith, with a multi-layered class system of the aristocracy, as well as the actual apparatus of power in the city, competing outlooks from the different clans on how to exist under the bootheel of the Liganti, and different attitudes from those whose loyalties lie elsewhere entirely. We need to see how religion and magic intertwine in all parts of the society, but in different ways and used differently. It’s a city full of different wants, and this is, in many ways, the book’s – and series’ – greatest strength. If I were to try to sell this to someone, to tell them to read it, the worldbuilding is where my thoughts would go first, because it is something the authors have done that I find rarely elsewhere. It’s even decided to stray out of the typical fantasy-pseudo-medieval-England pattern – there are strands of Venice in there, as well as South-Eastern European inspirations – which is a welcome relief, and a clear delineation when it comes to the naming conventions, which mix Italian and Slavic vibes, depending which cultural group we’re talking about.
And in the first two books, all this is an unmitigated good. It’s a glorious setting for pacy adventure hijinx and con artistry and heroics and some great emotional beats. There’s a moment in the first book that absolutely ruined me, as well as a wonderfully dramatic twist at the end. But when we come to the third one… we start to pay the cost of what we had, and that cost is mess and trying to hold a gajillion names in your head at once and remember who they all are and what they care about. And it does, at times, feel a lot, even if, by the end, it’s a cost worth paying.
Speaking of costs, however**, we come to the other major flaw. Ren, our main character, gets a happy ending. Great, wonderful, glad to hear it. But… it’s too happy. Or rather, she ends up with so very much, filling all the various sides of her desires, and despite their being trials along the way, when the balance is weighed, it ultimately feels like she hasn’t had to pay all that much of a cost to get what she gets, so it feels a little… unearned. Much of Labyrinth’s Heart is concerned with her shedding the con artist she’s been and embracing the real things she’s making and finding in life, and so to have this almost tricksily won ending, one that hasn’t cost her all that much in any lasting way, feels like a step backwards to the person she was at the beginning, not who she’s become through the journey. I didn’t want side characters I loved to die, or things to go dramatically wrong, but at the same time, I feel like the ending would have had that bit more weight for them.
It’s especially noticeable when the two primary supporting characters (who by this book have become Grey and Vargo, rather than Ren’s sister Tess, as was true in The Mask of Mirrors) very much do have debts to pay for their endings to come true, and debts that feel very true to their character journeys. Grey, a character defined by multiple, contradicting loyalties and the tension between his culture and what he seeks to achieve pays a cost in his identity, in who he feels he is, but for the sake of his future freedom and happiness. Vargo meanwhile has been on a journey of trust, learning that he has people around him and he can be part of a community, not standing above it, but he must pay the cost of a very dear connection to gain that community – for me, his ending is bittersweet, and possibly the emotional high point of the story. I was genuinely sad when it came due. But it meant that when we got to the end, we could really see how far he’d come, what he’d gained, and how much he’d wanted it, and what he’d lost to get there, and that made it so much more meaningful. And this just casts that shadow over Ren’s storing, her arc and her ending, because it feels like she’s been given the shorter, stickier stick when it comes to character development in comparison – she’s just the person all the things have happened to, not the one who’s got the growth out of them.
That being said… I did still give it 4 stars. I devoured it. I loved being back in the world. And I am, for the most part, not a person for whom the worldbuilding is the true highlight of stories. What I’m normally there for is characters, and while Ren herself may not have managed the greatest payoff we could have hoped for, I do think the satisfaction of Grey and Vargo’s journeys mostly makes up for it. If I’m honest… I love Vargo best anyway. And the good thing about there being a heckload of side characters is that quite a lot of them are absolutely delightful. There are some really meaningful bits of character work that happen all around the edges, as well as in the centre of the story, and I think one of the truly foundational bits of success the worldbuilding has is that it is peopled with people. They have real emotional lives and motivations and they feel like they would genuinely live in this world, as they are, interacting with each other in hilarious, delightful or sometimes sad ways, pulled by their wants and needs. I could start listing out for you the secondary characters I adored, and I would definitely need both sets of fingers, and possibly toes as well when it came down to it. And yet, for all that, I still come back to how great the world is.
And it’s not as if the plot is terrible either. Are there some reveals and twists that feel a little unsupported? Sure. Could we have done with a bit more space for all of it to Happen, rather than cramming it into the middle of book 3? Of course. Is it as good a book as the other two in the series? Maybe not. Did I enjoy it anyway? Absolutely. For all the problems it has getting there, and the lack of weight to some of the outcome, on the whole I thing the ending does a pretty good job of feeling like a true, good ending to the series as a whole, not just book three. The place the characters and the city end in feels like a genuine change from the start, without being a completely closed off solution – we can imagine there still being a story heading on after this, just a different one from the one that’s ended.
And… well… it was fun. I had fun. I preordered a book, received it, immediately read it, and had a lovely time. It may not be earth shattering, awards threatening or the greatest thing since sliced bread… but I enjoyed reading it. I wanted to keep picking it up, to find out what happened next, to know how it ended. Which is sometimes all you need or want.
*This is a trilogy with a culture that loves thread/sewing/weaving metaphors, and I am doing my absolute best not to litter this review with them entirely, but there had to be at least the one, for form’s sake. I make no promises that there won’t be more by the end.
**I am a master of segues. Hush.
A Reader of Else 