So this is probably gonna be an unpopular opinion but this felt like it was my least favorite Malazan book so far. Still liked it a lot overall but there were some fairly great issues for me.

But let’s start with things I liked. The overall just epic scope and super expansive world feels really great and just the amount of, for the lack of a better term, crazy shit that keeps happening in this story is somewhat mind blowing. It’s dark, it’s imaginative, it’s unexpected, just plain and simple: epic.

I also really enjoyed some of the new characters within this book. I really vibed with Lady Envy and Mok / the Seguleh and just thought they were really interesting and fascinating. Also meeting new Bridgeburners is kind of always a recipe for success. 

The humor has been the best out of any of the books so far and that is just another part of Erikson's amazing writing/prose that now really stands out.

Onto the negatives. I might start to discover some sort of personal core issue with the series and this a distinct lack of emotional investment into the characters. We get so many characters and POVs and oftentimes we spend a very long time getting back to a certain character and then I feel like the build up for certain big emotional moments isn’t really there. Emotional investment is a huge part of my enjoyment within any story and it is a little sad that I just have a hard time getting deeply invested into the characters of Malazan.

Another contributing factor to this could be the constant POV swaps. It is a little insane how many scenes and POVs some of these chapters are split into already and the way I understand it is, that this a trend that will also continue and accelerate further into the series. On top of that I also feel like this makes the book even harder to follow. I felt like I got way more used to Erikson's writing style in Deadhouse Gates but now Memories of Ice felt like a step backwards again. 

So overall that later part has me more than a little worried diving deeper into this series. Also the pacing felt somewhat off and I struggled the most with it out of any Malazan book so far. It started out great for the first 20-30% and then the middle 50% were so incredibly dense which slowed it down so much. The climax afterwards though was very epic and certainly the best out of any of the books so far.

So yeah I have very mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand it absolutely is this grand scale, world shattering Fantasy Epic that it is advertised to be but that kind of leaves a feeling of intimacy and investment into the characters behind. Not that it doesn’t take its time for small, impactful character moments, it does that and does it well, but the sheer amount of characters and just the vastness of this whole tale kind of leaves little room for that. I hope this somehow makes sense. 

Let’s see how House of Chains next month will go!