So yeah, penultimate Malazan book! The end is rapidly approaching (well for the main series, I know there is tons of supplementary material :) ) But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk about Dust of Dreams first.

I am having a little bit of mixed feelings about this one and the last time I felt something like that for a book in this series was with Memories of Ice. There was a lot to like/love here: Lots of new things that were just very intriguing from the get-go, just the reaping of rewards from previously established character bonds / storylines and also a pretty crazy ending! However there was one whole part of the book that was painful to get through and definitely hampered the whole experience for me. Let’s walk through it:

The first two parts of the book felt truly great to me. I thought they were just really well balanced with all these different looks and settings and emotions and everything. Yes, there is some truly dark stuff but it is also put into contrast a lot when you switch the scenery afterwards and you get some very humorous scenes for example. Like I said: balance. That was my main takeaway from the first of this book. All the storylines put you in very different emotional states and all this combined made for a truly great experience.

There is for example this new storyline that gives us a deep look into this truly alien civilization and it’s just captivating. There are these tribal people that are just really disturbing and brutal, we get a true Horror story with these new child characters, a big Mystery in this dream like sequencing with ghosts / dead characters, we also get a lot of humor with our favorite Letherian duo (although not in their best form in this book I must say!) and we have the Malazans / Bonehunters around that always give those feelings of camaraderie and bantering and just great characters (I think especially our mage characters stand out in this one!) in general. I didn’t really mind those characters that basically just went from point A to point B and were already my least favorite part about the book they first appeared in, Reaper’s Gale. 

But then we get to part three and it just felt like all this nice balance was just lost. The whole thing was very bleak, some parts of it felt like they were just super obtuse for the sake of it and yeah truly horrible things happen in this part. But that wasn’t even the worst part of it. Yes, reading about that one event was absolutely horrible but I get that it does serve a purpose in the grand scheme of things and we get some cool (and in some ways even more disturbing) payoff for it within the same novel. The main focus of this part was this conflict between these two tribal people and both of them were absolutely awful folk in their own way and I just couldn’t bring myself to care about either of them. So yeah a fourth of the book being a slog is sadly not very cool.

Thankfully it came back strong with the final part. I already mentioned the crazy ending (and everything leading up to it was very exciting) and yes far from everything is resolved but that’s what the next book is for. 

I also wanna mention the amount of exposition we get within this book. Pretty uncharacteristic for Erikson but hey its book nine out of then, maybe it is finally time to explain some things. xD It was very much appreciated and soaked up greedily. In the same vein another highlight of this book was all the scenes where we just get a bunch of super powerful, ancient elder gods scheming, bantering and foreshadowing things to come. Great stuff!

This book had lots to love but also a part to hate. Overall I think I will rank it towards the bottom of the Malazan novels. Maybe just above Memories of Ice. 

I’ll be doing a quick pit stop to read Wind and Truth (Stormlight #5) and then I’ll be back for The Crippled God. Maybe even a little sooner if I don’t end up loving Wind and Truth but I think chances of that are slim.