Just finished the powder mage series now. Excellent collection, really - I normally don't like guns in fantasy but goddamn this guy made it work. Very well made characters.
I started it right after finishing The Chronicles of the Black Company, and I think that detracted greatly from the beginning. Glen Cook at his prime (the final book of the Black Company) is leaps and miles ahead of Mcclellan starting out, the story never gets as serious or dark as it does in the Black Company and you can tell, but that's not necessarily a bad thing - it's just a different writing style. I will say that Mcclellan is never as good as Cook is by the end, but that's understandable - Mcclellan writes a lot faster and is a lot younger, he's more of a mass product writer, less experience and finesse.
Mcclellan is also a bit less liberal with killing off major characters until the very end of the series (not that I would have ever forgiven him if a certain key character actually had died.)
The story is told from the key perspectives of four characters: Field marshal Tamas, Legend, Savior, Butcher and the most powerful Powder Mage to ever live besides his son.
His son is another main character, Taniel Two-Shot; his chapters in the story serve almost exclusively to advance the key plot, which actually works against him as it's clear Mcclellan couldn't afford to have too many chapters including Taniel, so Taniel is given less character development and less spotlight time than he might deserve. Almost all of his screentime is given to either his romance plot (because of course there's a romance plot) or the mental anguish he suffers from being one of the world's greatest butchers.
Inspector Adamat, a minorly gifted man with a perfect memory, is the third key character. His sections personally bored me, but they were key to give the reader important plot points that would otherwise go unnoticed. It, personally, greatly detracted from the main plot (being Tamas' war and Taniel's god-killing) when we would suddenly shift from a pitched battle to a guy looking through some archives for information. It was worth it at the end though, when we find out who the Proprietor is.
Then there's the last major character perspective - Nila.
Nila's perpectives suck.
I'm not going to lie, I was seriously rooting for her death throughout the series. Nila is a laundress. That is all. For the first 2 and a half books, and all of the short stories, Nila is literally the most useless, counterproductive and boring character in the entire novel. Then, out of nowhere around the middle of the third (and final) book, she turns out to be a special sorceress who doesn't need gloves to work her magic (something only gods are normally capable of) who will also be the most powerful Adran sorceress in over 600 years. Screw her.
Anyway, each chapter usually contains all four of these perspectives (with small skips between the two that might initially be confusing, I confused Tamas and Taniel in sudden perspective shifts more than once), and despite some unfortunate factors in some of the perspectives, the story is still more than interesting enough for me to have kept on reading on.
I'm wondering what to read next. I kinda expected this to last me longer. A while ago Sethaniel recommended that I read the Dragaeran books by Steven Brust (here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Brust#The_Dragaeran_books ), bookmarked the author but never actually read the books, I'm considering looking into them now.
