Gardens of the Moon review

I am still a couple hundred pages off from finishing this book, but I can already tell that I am hooked. I didn't feel this way for most of the book, however.

Gardens of the Moon, the first book in the Malazon Book of the Fallen series, is by far the most confusing book I have ever read. The author, Steven Erikson, even admits that it's confusing, and it's exactly what he intended. He didn't want to have to lead the reader by the hand through the book, and decided to plop them right down in the middle of everything. All the while, the time skips forward every couple hundred pages or so, and it's difficult to tell what side everyone is on, if they're on a side at all. I don't know whether to applaud his bravery at trying this, or toss the book across the room.

I'm glad I kept with it though. I have experience with books like this, and I trusted that it would get better. It did. A lot of this book relies on the reader to figure stuff out on their own. It treats them like an intelligent thinking being, and after my initial irritation, I really appreciated this.

One reason for this confusion is the narrator. It's so far in the third person omnipresent that it jumps from mind to mind within a single paragraph. Most of the time that I see this in a novel, it's sporadic and unintentional. It's when the chapter is in the POV of one character, but a few times we get the feelings or thoughts of another, just because it's handy for the plot or to keep the reader informed. In Gardens of the Moon, if there is a character mentioned, we know how it feels. This can be both very confusing, as most people are not used to it, but also very handy. We get most of our information this way, either from direct thoughts from characters, or by being able to see the connection between two characters. The narrator is so deep, that it's very rare to actually hear the narrator's voice. I would say that 95% of the story is told by the characters. This includes plot, for what is going on now, and what has happened thousands of years before the story even started.

Gardens of the Moon is meant for an advanced reader, one willing to take on a challenge. It starts off being very difficult and confusing, but once the reader starts to understand, the book is very enjoyable.