/lit/ - Literature

I read the second book to Foundryside, titled "Shorefall". Because I hate myself, I guess.
This book is marginally better than ther first one, only for the fact that there's less whining about slavery and virtue signaling. There's still *some*, just less of it. Instead, there's more edginess, and to the book's merit, some pretty nice pay offs.

I don't know how this is supposed to be a trilogy, because the second book immediately start addressing the biggest and most threatening conflict that the first book hinted at. This I actually like. No pussyfooting around, trying to stretch the narrative by hanging a big conflict over book 2 that will never be addressed until book 3. No, they get right into the most pressing conflict, and then by the end of the book, some pretty huge shit happens. And it made me think, when was the last time I got such a massive payoff to a plot before? It's been a long time.

The downside is that the plot is carried mainly by the girl from the first book who is completely flat. Her whole shtick is being a theif, who is kind of difficult to talk to, because all she says is "yeah". The "yeah" shtick is terrible, because there's nothing to fill the void where interesting dialogue should be. When she's not saying "yeah", she has very little to say, except little irreverent quips, or curses of shock. But not only that she's not acting as a thief anymore this book. Her main thing is gone. Everyone else is better at doing everything else. She only acts as a vessel for the plot devices to be held.

The only other character who could have been interesting, gets turned into a zombie. His personality stripped away. So he too has very little to say. He's only there to do the fighting.

With such weak characters, I can't really feel the impact of major plot points. Some of the stuff that happens is really cool in concept. But it's just not impactful. I would still recommend against reading this series. It does not get significantly better.