Customer Reviews

The Edge Chronicles 10: The Immortals

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THE IMMORTALS represents the final book in the Edge Chronicles and presents nearly 700 pages for its grand finale. Young lamplighter Nate is forced to flee for his life to a mighty city, there to face turbulent times, potential war, and more. A fine survey evolves in this stormy ending that will change the entire Edge world forever.

Only part way in, but so far it has the same fun and adventure of the previous 9 books :)

OMGosh! I loved the last installment of the Edge Chronicles. I can't understand why it took so long to come out and the only thing I didn't like about it is that it's huge and doesn't go with the other books.. the same design. But other than that it was soooo good! I highly recommend this.

This was an excellent book, written in the tradition of all the other Edge Chronicle books. Questions that I've had while reading the series- like what is stone sickness and why did it strike- are all answered. Nate is a great addition to the cast of characters. A pleasure to read.

Another in the series... My son has read the whole series and lends the books out to his friends as well. That should tell you now much he likes the books. Even his friend's father read the books.

I've been feeling the steampunk itch more often than not lately and I've just started to nose about the subgenre. Since I will pick up and read almost anything, one of the the books I picked up recently was The Edge Chronicles: The Immortals. It concerns the adventures of one Nate Quarter as he escapes from his underpaid job as a mine lamplighter and goes forth into the world to have adventures.

It's rather embarrassing as I can usually sum up a book better than that, but in terms of sheer narrative schizophrenia, this one takes the cake. Without fail, every time I thought a small narrative resolution was in sight and so close I could almost pat it on the head and give it a biscuit, the story would stop and restart from somewhere else past the potential small resolution. Since it happened several times over the course of the book, most notably around the beginnings and ends of the rather arbitrary sections of the book, I can only assume that it was written with the attention span of a goldfish in mind and that an adventure-y type book didn't need small resolutions after the subplots had been closed. As an aside, goldfish can have really long attention spans if they figure out there is something good coming as a reward. No such luck here.

The instance in particular that stuck out in my mind was after Nate had spent most of of one section of the book trying to find a healing solution for a comatose Eudoxia, he finally finds one... and then there's a cut to Eudoxia well and the pair of them walking back to get a ride back home. I'm sorry but after a quarter of the book following Nate's determination that he had to find a healer and then a cure for Eudoxia, couldn't we have at least seen that cure administered and a happy reunion? It was jarring and actually ticked me off because there was utterly no effort to disguise it. There aren't any transitions between the close of one section and the beginning of the next. What was even more annoying was that I could easily see breaking the narrative into four coherent pieces with an underlying theme... if the effort was made to do so in a reasonable manner. Furthermore, if there had been decent transitions it might have worked as a more linear story.

I probably would have left this book after the first few ugly transitions if the characters had not been mildly engaging and the world setting so interesting. Unfortunately, the odd pacing and division of the narrative really shied away from character depth of any sort. The poor overall narrative structure had the sad consequence of neglecting character development in favor of... something else. I'm still not entirely sure what was deemed more important than character development and expansion, but when I find it, I might have to kill it with fire. Nothing should ride so roughshod over character development and growth like that. In any case, no character really becomes more than what they started as (aside from in a material way) and they palled for me after a while.

After all the ranting, I find that the only really good things I have to say are about the setting. I liked the different gobliniod tribes, the politicking between the Great Glade and the Hive and the sheer variety of strange things that get a mention in the book. It's a really awesome setting. Sadly, due to the aforementioned gripes, I found I couldn't really enjoy this book.