I love this series so much. This one saw THREE of my favourite characters from the other books make an appearance, which is super exciting. And Kai is SUCH a good character. Everyone is amazing, really. The, like, chapter-long theology conversation between Kai and Teo was like chocolate. This series is just… such a confluence of my interests. I’m DYING for a Cat POV book. Her relationship with her goddess fascinates me.

Max Gladstone continues to amaze me with the unique world of the Craft Sequence, as well as his prose. I love the way he juxtaposes opposing images of beauty and trauma in just a few seemingly simple words.I read this book as part of my first ever read-a-long which was a really great experience. First of all, it motivated me to get on with reading it, and because I had to keep stopping to avoid spoiling myself each week, it led to a lot of incredible speculation in discussion with my friend and

I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue on with the Craft Sequence books after Two Serpents Rise. I really didn't like that book and it kind of turned me off from the series. For some reason in the depths of a reading slump, Full Fathom Five called to me and I'm glad I listened.Full Fathom Five is the 3rd published Craft Sequence book but is 5th chronologically and it gets confusing sometimes. The story follows Kai, a priestess that creates idols for her Order, and Izza, a street urchin thief. I r...

4 starsThis month’s reading has been going quite well, this book is one of the stand-outs of the month for me. It felt like a book perfectly crafted just for my reading enjoyment! • Female protagonists with believable and complex characterisation ✓• Interesting and unique world that the characters live in✓• Improvement on the preceding book ✓I preferred the writing style in which this was written in comparison to “Two Serpents Rise”, the way Max Gladstone wrote his prose felt quite different to

(A version of this first appeared at SF Signal)Kai is a priestess without a God, at least in the traditional sense. She manages and builds Idols, financial instruments for managing soulstuff for those engaged in the cutthroat world of international commerce in Max Gladstone’s Craft Universe. They accept sacrifices, provide a rate of return, and protect those who invest their worship in them. But these Idols, although they have the financial obligations and entanglements like any God, are not rea...

3.5 stars. It's such interesting world building and I do get a good picture of the characters. Not quite a 4 because the writing can be so baroque- too many words wrapping around the descriptions that I want to skip ahead and not read them all.

The first stars shone at sunset. As blue gave way to black their comrades joined them, mockingly bright. Skyspires on the horizon ate starlight and moonlight and sea reflections alike.Cool wind blew off the water.Penitents watched, and waited.Decades past, their master had left Kavekana for the God Wars, traveling with his sisters and the Archipelago's finest men. Bound west to war, they stopped at every island, held tournaments, chose the best and brightest to join their number. They sang as th...

Awesome world building as always: set on an island in which priests build and service idols, constructs without freewill or consciousness that allow people to place their soulstuff safe in the knowledge that they're not supporting the worship of mercurial and dangerous deities. Kai finds herself shunted off to a desk job when something goes wrong with her friend's idol--and soon into deeper waters as it becomes obvious that it's not just one idol that went wrong... A strong mixture of characters...

5 StarsFull Fathom Five demonstrates how incredible an adult oriented fantasy can be. Max Gladstone is on top of his game. Each of the books in The Craftwork Sequence is an improvement on the last, with book one being a near a masterpiece. Gladstone is rare in that he wants each book to be able to read alone, even though they are very connected. They take place in the same world and even have some recurring characters. Each of the first three of the Craftwork Sequence explore something different...

And Gladstone does it again. His books pass the Bechdel test in spades. The world building is great, and heavy concepts are dealt with extremely well.

Bought for the cover...obviously.Stayed for the awesome story. This was fantasy at its best. Those novels that grab you and bring you into a world both rich and strange.Let's talk about that cover! I mean look at it! Two WoC on the same cover. The world didn't come to an end. Guess what, I bought the Kindle version and a hardcover because I love the cover.Max Gladstone's 'Craft Sequence' novels are the reason I return to my beloved fantasy genre time and again. Not to mention the prominence of w...

Ahoy there me mateys! So in previous times, wendy @ the biliosanctum set me on a series of adventures that led to me reading the first book in The Craft Sequence, three parts dead. I absolutely loved it. The second book was two serpents rise. That was not nearly as good as the first but I adore the world and certainly wanted the next book. Like the others, I read this one without reading the blurb first. No real spoilers aboard but read at yer own peril . . .This installment turned out to be muc...

4.75 stars, I think.I was going to rate it 4-4.5 stars for a majority of the book, but the final 100 pages were soooo good, so I'm bumping it up. All in all, I really enjoyed this and I'm so glad because Two Serpents Rise was definitely not my favourite book. Proper RTC later! Hopefully. This is me, afterall.

tldr: please be patient up to half of the story by absorbing the details. The last 20% were marvelous!==============I blame Three Parts Dead for making me set a high standard for Full Fathom Five (FFF) and other Craft Sequence novels. High standard in plot developments, and high standard of world building, and high standard for making me surprised. FFF only lacks in speed of plot development for the first half. Sometimes there was interesting development, but mainly I have to be patient and pay

There's so much to like in this book. Its most obvious feature is its complete uniqueness -- nothing else quite like it exists in the genre, and so it persistently eludes classification. Is it epic fantasy? The cities and countries are fictional (albeit clearly based on real places), yet the descriptions of those places and the people in them feel distinctly modern. So it's urban fantasy, then? Not quite that, either. It is ITS OWN THING, and that's a very good thing.The prose itself goes far be...

I'm still mightily impressed by this author. I'm placing him on a slightly higher pedestal than most Urban Fantasy lists.Hell, it's not even *quite* an Urban Fantasy anyway. It's just plain fantasy, and this title proves it.Street urchins, god-Advocates, grand injustice, and an oh-so-deep mystery. It's fathoms deep. I'm amazed. And rather disturbed. I'm going to be having nightmares about body-cavity living dolls now.I love it.These novels keep going in the strangest directions. It's as if the a...

Just a couple of thoughts on this one:1. Much, much better than its predecessor Two Serpents Rise. Like that one, the first half of Full Fathom Five is fairly slow going. Unlike that one, I didn't totally lose interest and stop reading. Things start juggernauting rapidly towards the end of FFF and Max Gladstone does a terrific job of pulling all his disparate threads together.2. While I like Gladstone's twisty, deep state plots, I think what I really appreciate about his books are the quality of...

From the titles to the page, the first three books in the Craft Sequence marry numbers with magic. The stories themselves explore different parts of society, but always on the bedrock of a spiritual economy, with soul stuff being traded and bartered to power the world. FULL FATHOM FIVE weaves together new and old characters on an island of idols and mysteries, creating a slowly building hope that is impossible to resist.As with THREE PARTS DEAD, this story starts in the clinical mechanics of a s...

Full fathom five thy father lies;Of his bones are coral made;Those are pearls that were his eyes:Nothing of him that doth fade,But doth suffer a sea-changeInto something rich and strange.Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:Ding-dong.Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.–Ariel’s Song, from The Tempest, Shakespeare Deep breath: a dive into the water, immersed in something alien, and yet familiar. This is the best I can summarize Full Fathom Five, an inventive fantasy that had me riveted, fighting th...

Third in the series but I think it may be the best one yet. The world is starting to tie together in lots of interesting ways. This time we are taken to a city that wants nothing to do with the gods and deathless kings that rule other parts of the world; religion is not snuffed out but rather minds are reprogrammed the right way by giant stone terrors known as penitents. Rather than gods or goddesses this is a land of idols; keep some of the benefits but none of the pesky will that deities tend