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Dead Country
The Craft Wars #1
by Max Gladstone
Tordotcom, $17.99, 256pp
Published: March 2023

I've read the first four books in Max Gladstone's 'Craft Sequence', but it's been a while. I read and reviewed those back in 2016 and haven't yet picked up book five, which looks like it belongs, with a number in the title and consistent cover art, and book six, which doesn't in any of those ways. This is book seven, but it's also the first in a separate trilogy called 'The Craft Wars' and it plays to me a lot closer to YA. Maybe it doesn't quite get there, but it's never far away and it plays out with a YA sort of single-mindedness and length.

The lead is Tara Abernathy, from 'Three Parts Dead', the opening book in the series, as well as the fifth, 'Four Roads Cross', but she's not in the big city of Alt Coulumb here, where she's the in-house Craftswoman to the god Kos Everburning. She's on her way back home to a tiny village, Edgemont, to attend her father's funeral. To suggest that there's a barrier between her and the villagers is a ruthless understatement. Because they're close to the Badlands, warped and devastated by Craft in the God Wars, they don't trust anyone with magical ability, which is the primary reason she left in the first place.

Her mother and a childhood friend aside, she doesn't like them and they don't like her, but they're going to have to find a way to get along because the monsters of the Badlands, known as Raiders, are gaining strength and confidence under the leadership of someone called the Seer. They killed everyone at Blake's Rest, through which Tara travels on her journey, and her dad died while he was defending Edgemont from them. Their meagre defences aren't going to do the job for long, so it's down to Tara and Dawn, a young lady she rescues from Blake's Rest, to enhance them. At least the latter is a talent, however raw and untrained, so Tara acquires a companion and apprentice at the same time.

While this is clearly part of the 'Craft Sequence', with Gladstone's fascinating take on wizards as a fantasy version of lawyers, well-read, highly knowledgeable and dedicated to rules and detail. The idea of a spell in this world is deliberately phrased like a contract, which means that to rebuild the wards around Edgemont, Tara has to grok the village, to know not only its borders but every field and every family and every detail of their shared history. The more she knows, the better the spell contract will be and the more effective against Raiders.

And that's pretty much it. This is a novel rather than a novella, but it's not a long novel and it's an obviously shorter novel than any of the other 'Craft Sequence' books. That means that we focus on a single protagonist with maybe two prominent supporting characters and a smattering of others who mostly exist to deepen the leads. We also focus on only three locations and one of those only briefly. That's Blake's Rest, merely a stop on the way to Edgemont, the primary setting. The third is the Badlands, because things go well but not well enough and that means that our leads aren't done in the village and have to journey into the dangerous wastes to finish the job.

I liked this and I'd suggest that it's an easy book to like. It's simple and straightforward but it isn't just a surface read. I believe that it could be read that way and anyone who doesn't want to think ought to enjoy it. However, its true value will only be found by a reader who's willing to dig into its themes and let them resonate. Even then, it can't compare to the broader and deeper books that brought the series this far, but it doesn't try to. It's an enjoyable aside for anyone who's immersed themselves in the world of the 'Craft Sequence' but wants something a little lighter right now.

The most obvious theme is home. As an ex-pat, I understand that going home isn't ever as simple as just getting on a plane. Home is a when as much as a where and absence changes it as much as presence. Tara was hounded out of Edgemont as a teenager and that can't have stuck well in her memories. That she then learned how to use her abilities and became something of a bigshot in a big city, dealing with gods and monsters, only shifted her further away from the insular villagers she'll have to reacquaint herself with. It's like spending a decades chilling with Hollywood royalty then going home to the sticks where the biggest star is the kid who won the school talent contest. They didn't have much in common when they kicked her out. They have less in common now.

A lesser theme but an important one is the way that such a massive difference in experiences isn't necessarily a thing of absolutes. That childhood friend is Connor Cavanaugh and I absolutely loved the scenes in the third act when he transitioned from yet another yokel she left behind to a young man with character of his own and talents of his own too, even if they aren't rooted in magic. It's a lesson in humility, just as most of the book is a lesson in affirmation. She left for a reason and her time back in Edgemont only underlines that it was a good reason and a good thing for her in most ways. That's a small mercy when her father is dead, but it's an important one.                                                                               

This can be read as a standalone novel. I've read the first book in the 'Craft Sequence', which is an important book for Tara Abernathy, but I'd suggest that you'd be fine diving in here without that one behind you. Because I haven't read the fifth book, which continues her story in Alt Coulumb, I can guarantee that you don't need to either. It looks like the author may be setting this up as the beginning of a trilogy to wrap up the series. If that's the case, I'm sure the broader story will come a-knockin' at some point and so I ought to track down books five and six to get myself up to speed. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Max Gladstone click here

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