/lit/ - Literature

Just finished the final Lightbringer book. I haven't read much in the past few years but decided to return to the series because I remember liking it when I was younger.

My thoughts haven't entirely settled on the series yet (in part because it's been a while since I read the other parts) but I'd say that all in all it's a pretty good set of fiction books. Lots of plot lines get all tied together in the end, almost too perfectly. In fact, it seems ridiculous how many different threads the author ties together, it left me feeling almost too good, like a cheesy feel good movie. I found myself much preferring some characters to others. Some parts of the climax were poorly written or didn't make full sense to the reader (e.g. as interesting as the light-magic theme was, it was pretty hard to understand how the network of mirrors and lighwells all joined together with one man on an island drafting white light at night to another man on another island controlling an array of mirrors with different light all just to illuminate a battlefield to empower fighters against specific "color bane" who can cancel out their respective colors, what I'm trying to get across was that, despite an interesting magic system, it was a lot to comprehend and difficult to envision as it was so abstract)

Meaningful Spoilers:
I found some characters far more enjoyable to read than others, but some parts were just long and irritating. For example Dazen / Gavin was an enjoyable character to read but the whole part about him repeatedly using black luxin magic to change his memory was just sloppy, his dialogues with Gunner were enjoyable, but when he was making his pilgrimage, talking to who he thinks is Lucidonious (actually Sevastion) and then talking with Slave rower / prophet who is actually Orholam (The God of the universe) etc., the whole thing got very longwinded. I get that we were meant to be unsure of whether he was hallucinating, fighting pagan gods who are deceiving, ascendant to heaven or actually just on top of a big mountain with really big mirror, but with so much shit going on being unsure of what is happening gets pretty tiresome.

I liked the twist about the grandfather (Andross Guile) being the Messiah, not the main character. In fact I wish that we got much more character development from the grandfather in earlier books (perhaps in the form of flashbacks) as it seems to me that the Andross / Felia plot-line may have been planned from the start, but needed more structure to make sense. Far too many happy endings, not enough people dying, good people not being redeemed. Of the roughly ten most important characters (Kip, Tisis, Karris, Gavin/Dazen, Teia, Ironfist, Andross, Liv, Corvan, Koios, Grinwoody (Old man of the desert)) only the bad ones died aside from the main character who dies and is then resurrected (by god in the form of a liquor merchant who also saved Karris some 20 odd years ago, like I said everything seems to perfect).