Locklands

Robert Jackson Bennett
Completed 1/20/2025 Reviewed 1/21/2025
2 Stars

I didn’t care for this last installment of the Founder’s Trilogy.  I really liked Foundryside, the first book.  I thought Shorefall was kind of meh.  This one was a slog to get through.  It had action, it had tension, it had a plot, but I was tired with it within a hundred pages.  It took me over two weeks to finish.  It had no humor in it, even though Clef was back.  There were some new characters who I didn’t understand.  And I feel like the trilogy fell into the familiar format of Book 1: Save the world; Book 2: Really save the world; and Book 3:  OMG, SAVE THE WORLD!

The book picks up eight years later.  It begins with our characters in a fierce battle.  Almost immediately, one dies.  Berenice feels responsible.  Then our gang finds out that Trevanne is trying to find a way to destroy and reset the world.  So they set on a quest to find and stop them.  This takes them on progressively more dangerous missions as they try to get close to Trevanne while outsmarting them.  In the meantime, Clef goes on a painful journey of self-discovery of his past through visions.  He starts to put together what happened before he became a key, and how that relates to the current chaos.  In the meantime, Sancia and Berenice, who married eight years before, must consider the sacrifices they must make to make sure that Trevanne is defeated.

One of the big things I didn’t like about this book was the magic system.  The major form is scriving, and there’s a subclass of scriving called twinning.  Scriving is a way to give something powers or convince something it is not what it is.  Twinning entails creating duplicates so you can hide an original something.  People aren’t supposed to twin.  In Shorefall, Sancia and Berenice twinned so that they were able to communicate telepathically.  In this book, everyone was twinned.  Hence, most of the dialogue was telepathic.  And with the scriving, all the battles became battles of getting enough scriving done to change the way things were happening.  I found it often confusing and rather tedious.  So rather than enchanting us with the magic like in the first book, I felt overloaded by the magic.

I also would have liked Sancia to remain the main point of view character.  Instead, it was Berenice.  I like her, but I think after two books where Sancia is the POV, I would have adapted easier to this book if she remained as such.  However, the switch did make for a much more dramatic and intense end.  The end and the epilogue were actually quite well done.  It was the one time I wanted to keep reading.  

One thing I didn’t quite get were the characters of Design and Greeter.  It seemed like they were entities composed of many people who had given their consciousness to one central sense.  It was not like the hosts enslaved by Trevanne, but a voluntary thing.  Why people would do that, I never figured out.  Later in the book, one of the secondary characters joined Design, which perplexed me.  And I didn’t get how they physically interacted with the main characters.

I give this book two stars out of five.  I was really disappointed at how disinterested I was with it.  Nothing really grabbed me until the end, and at well over five hundred pages, it took much too long for the end to come.  I have one of Bennett’s Shirley Jackson Award winning horror novels as well.  One of these days, I’ll get around that.  Hopefully, it will be more like a first novel, being a standalone.