Finished reading Janet Morris’ Beyond Sanctuary and I’ve got mixed feelings on the book. On the one hand, some of the language recalls Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. The book is inclusive, with its Sacred Band partners. The scope opens up vastly from the contained Thieves World short stories. The grim and morally grey Thieves World will always have a place in my heart.
But, there’s something holding me back from an unabashed endorsement. The offhand treatment of rape is jarring – it’s not even lazy grimdark shorthand, it’s just a thing that gets a sentence here and there, that bothers me. And there’s an at-times fuzziness to the plot and writing. Without having read a bunch of Thieves World anthologies (which I have, mostly, mind you), much of the book would become inscrutable.
Now I'm switching gears to Megan Lindholm's /Robin Hobb's Wizard of Pigeons.