The Dark Prophecy is straight up a sequal to The Hidden Oracle. Pretty much all of my comments from apply here. Apollo is still a decent but not great main character, Meg is still odd and weirdly powerful. The world still feels like something we’ve seen done better in Riordan’s other series.

The main different of the Dark Prophecy and the part that amused me the most: it’s almost completely set in Indianapolis. You don’t get that overly often in fiction and it’s always amusing to see it done. For someone that lives within spitting distance of Indianapolis, close enough.

“Your librarians go into battle?”

“When they must,” said Lirael. “The Library is very old, and deep, and contains many things that have been put away for good reason. Creatures, dangerous knowledge, artifacts made not wisely, but too well … books that should not be opened without proper preparation, some books that should never be opened at all.”

Compared to the original trilogy, both Clariel the book and Cariel the character have a rather different feel.

As a book, Clariel takes place centuries before Sabriel, well before the fall of the Old Kingdom. We’re in an entirely different political landscape and rather than the general feeling of things coming back together (other than the whole end of the world thing), there’s a feel of falling apart. We’re square in the height of decadence that comes before the fall, with a failing monarchy, an Abhorsen who’d rather hunt than deal in death, and Charter Magic fallen out of fasion. It’s an interesting time period to explore, don’t get me wrong. It’s just rather different.

As I mentioned in , Abhorsen is really the second half of a book. It doesn’t stand alone, but it doesn’t need to. We continue where we left off in Lirael and things keep escalating.

Worldbuildingwise, we have a much deeper dig into the deep history of the world, into the roots of Free Magic beings and the Charter. We learn more about Mogget and the Dog both along with our big bad: Orannis, the Destroyer. On to the end of the world…

In a nutshell, Zoe’s Tale is The Last Colony told from Zoe’s point of view.

It definitely has a different feel to it than the rest of the Old Man’s War books, matching the idea that it was written by a teenage girl (having never been one, I can’t guarantee the accuracy, but it worked for me).

Lirael is a bit odd when it comes to a sequel. While it’s set in the same world as Sabriel (and Sabriel even has a part to play), Lirael takes place a fair few years later, following two new characters: Lirael–daughter of the glacier bound seers only mentioned in Sabriel–and Prince Sameth–Sabriel and Touchstone’s son and Abhorsen in Waiting.

Once you get beyond the initial surprise at the change in topic, it’s another wonderful book. I’m honestly not sure which I prefer. Lirael is a wonderful character. She’s an outsider among an entire people who have an ability she does not, which is a recognizable situation to be in who turns into what’s effectively a battle librarian–who doesn’t love a battle librarian?

Sabriel is a wonderful book. Fantasy books dealing with death magic are among my favorites, the worldbuilding is fantastic (in the truest sense of the world), and the main characters are all a lot of fun. Each time I spend long enough without reading it, I always forget just how much I enjoy reading (or in this case listening too) this book.

The worldbuilding is great. You don’t get the sense of mechanical precision you would get from someone like Sanderson, but it’s a world that feels both magical and ‘real’, which is always something I’m looking for. In particular, the idea of a magical world and a WWIish era technological world, separated by a sometimes porous wall is a neat one. Even though it’s not an uncommon trope, I have yet to find a book that does it quite as well. Especially the eponymous Sabriel’s experience being born and of one kingdom, but raised in a boarding school and with the perspective of the other. I really want to know so much more than we’re given about this history of this world…

The Hidden Oracle is an odd book. As a second sequel series to first Percy Jackson and the Olympians and then the Heroes of Olympus, we do get new main characters characters: Apollo, now in mortal form and Meg, surprisingly powerful plant magic demigod with some cool Roman swords. But we also get a number of guest appearances and references to previous characters: especially Percy Jackson himself.

It’s interesting have a setting and characters we can relate to to help ground us in the new series, but on the other hand, if I wanted to read about Percy Jackson, couldn’t I just read his series again? I remember having the same problem with Heroes of Olympus.

I have a large number of keyword bookmarks in whichever browser I happen to be using at the time that I’ve been building up over the years¹. One of the ones I particular enjoy is text: data:text/html, <html contenteditable>. What that does is open a new tab where I can take notes, completely locally. It’s really handy… but there’s one big problem: I often accidentally close the tab and lose whatever I had been typing. So I decided to take a few minutes to write up a simple extension of the idea that would save the data to LocalStorage.

After John’s story in Old Man's War and Jane’s (to some extent) in The Ghost Brigades, this time around we get both of them. They’re together now and raising Zoë (how’s that for a complicated family), when they’re tapped to head an entirely new colony planet Roanoke–with the first city named Croatoan. Also… why would they even agree to that?

I mean… come on. Either no one knows the history behind the names–in which case why in the world would they be using them–or they do–in which case why in the world would you choose that to name your new colony. Granted, they turn out to want it to be lost, but still. It’s a bit annoying.