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[used as placeholder for entire series]

I don't think this is poorly written - I just personally don't enjoy mystery novels, and this is more mystery than fantasy. I also feel that the magic system is too detailed and mechanistic, which makes it uninteresting.

The world crafted by Max is very vivid and unique. If you read the stories in the "titled" order not the published order, the stories flow very well together.

Reading all 5 books in one book was a truly pleasurable experience. I enjoyed immersing myself into the world of Craft, fascinating characters and interesting stories. I particularly like how every book is part of the same universe, but set in a different time period or a geographical location. I loved when main or supporting characters from one book got to know the characters from the other books... I'm really looking forward to seeing more of that and reading more from this series. Max Gladsto...

The sequence, so far, consists of five books, which came to me as a discounted bundle on Kindle (£5.39). Some time later, I was prompted to write a review by some spam from Amazon purporting to be selling "Kindle books like The Craft Sequence"No! There are no books like The Craft Sequence! Max Gladstone has a very strange mind (but with some admirable qualities!)The collection began with the author's foreword - which showed a nice dry sense of humour that only partly came across in the actual bo...

Money really is magical. It allows us to feed ourselves, to feed others, to build and form and enjoy. Deployed properly, it can influence, and even bind others to our will. But the Craft Sequence asks, "well, that's all well and good, but what if magic were money?".In that case, it suggests, then wizards would be lawyers, and Gods would be banks, and contracts would bite in more than a purely symbolic sense. Students would go to universities in the sky and learn to carve their names into souls s...

A great way to start reading the Hugo nominated Craft SequenceReading this Kindle ebook is a great way to start reading the Craft Sequence. The books collected in this Kindle ebook are well-written, with realistic characters, great themes, and great endings. I highly recommend this Kindle ebook: five stars.

A very interesting world of magic and power, gods and faith, contracts and soulstuff. I look forward to reading more.(P.S. Goodreads, you know this is an omnibus; it should count as five books!)

Clever, gripping, and astonishingly original! These books are set in a world similar to our present day, except that gods are real, and magic works, and as a result technology never developed the same way as ours. Cultures are obviously different, too, and place names also. However, the descriptions of gods and people in various places give clues, and I had a lot of fun trying to map the places named in the books onto their real-world correspondences.The series doesn't follow a linear chronology...

At first, I kept...... Reading because I found the concepts of God and Craft fascinating. However, somewhere around a third of the way through, the of stories and characters twined into each other in a way that caught the rest of my attention, too.Builds steadily throughout.

I've said a lot about these books in other places. I highly recommend this series.Edited on 7th November to remove dates and add: While there are many places on Goodreads that I've spoken about these books, there's one place off Goodreads I wanted to link - I wrote a review of sorts on /r/Fantasy recommending the Craft sequence to fans of Brandon Sanderson and Robert Jordan. I'm reproducing it below.---------------------------------------------------------------I just finished a re-read of the s...

The Novels Craft Imagination's NegotiationReading the books in the order they were written negotiates a willing contract to the great imagination of the Craft Sequence. Every book is a solid narrative. The character introduced along the way are all solid and have a special suspenseful role in the fifth book (Four Rows...). I got more excited as I reached that climax because I cared much for those people and their desire to build their world.

Maybe I shouldn’t have committed to reading all five of these books back to back. It took me two months, and I have forgotten what the hell else I was meant to be doing with my bookish life. But, on the other hand? This world deserves total immersion.Would I recommend undertaking this marathon readthrough? Depends how you like to experience your sprawling SFF series. Reading all five in sequence, you catch every cross-reference, picking up more easily on the shape of the loose arc these books de...

Superb fantasy analogy in fascinating city-scapesIt's so rare to read truly original fantasy, but Gladstone has managed to put together a world brimming with clever ideas. And the stories in this mega-volume are intelligent: they demonstrate that fantasy can provide allegories for contemporary politics and society, but without being on-the-nose about it. My only (minor) gripe is that Gladstone has a tendency to have his tales devolve into massive showdown set pieces. If this were a series of Mar...

It's a bit sad how much I love books where people go to work in offices and deal with beauracracy despite magic and dragons and necromancy! Some great worldbuilding explored through connecting stories.

Here's my review of this 5 books series! I'm not doing the usual copy paste here this time because it's quite long, but I gave this 5 stars so I guess it speaks for itself!

Summary: Approximately 150 years ago, the people of the New World rose up against their gods (who were, for the most part, deserving of being risen against - think of gods in the ancient Aztec mold). After nearly a century of all-out warfare, the humans were victorious, and the gods were defeated, dismembered, destroyed, and other unpleasant things starting with “D.” In the wake of the so-called “God Wars,” humans (and former humans) have built a society based on the Craft, a system of high-powe...

inventive and solid world-building, excellent characterization. I particularly enjoyed the vampire addicts, a plausible and piercing note of horror. Highly recommended.

Absolutely fantastic. Necromancer lawyers and godly banks, this is one of the most imaginative settings in modern fantasy.