Rare and wonderful is the book that can tie together nine or more other books into one huge and satisfying tapestry and give us something truly satisfying.

This one does it. Even those side novels from before got woven into this. Hell, even Jimmy the Hand, an old man by this time, while not doing anything here, has his many adventures come back to haunt everyone in this dire time. :)

A whole world of terrible fighters, a mad god, and the full destruction of a world. This is what we have here. Millions displaced. Whole realities eaten.

Oh, yeah, and while I'm not going to spoil it for anyone here, there is one super-delightful twist that colors SO MUCH that has happened over 20 books in a brand new and wicked light. :) I think I might be enjoying this aspect more than all the rest.

Epic fantasy? Epic, EPIC fantasy.

I won't ever call it as good as WoT or a handful of other series, but by no means is this a slouch. :) I've read whole huge series faithfully that doesn't strike my fancy half as much as this. So, yeah, I like it very much. :) ( )

This is the final book in the Darkwar Saga, the third-to-last subseries in the very large Riftwar Cycle. 26 books down, 5 to go!

I had mixed feelings. There were a lot of parts where I was very interested in what was going on, and there were a few parts (particularly during the battles) where things felt a little tedious. A lot of big stuff happened and there were some interesting revelations that tied back to all the earlier books, much of which I had mixed feelings about.

Most of what I have to say about this book needs to go in spoiler tags:
Even though many people will survive and have the chance to make a new home for themselves, I hated seeing the destruction of Kelewan. I especially hated that the Cho-ja died with their world.

I was really sad that Nakor died, but it was interesting to finally get some explanation about just what was up with him. I’m not so sure what I think of learning that Kalkin has been manipulating Pug’s life from the start. It wasn’t a surprising revelation, there have been plenty of indicators that the gods were manipulating some of the major players, but I’d rather the characters had been acting completely on their own initiative. I do think Pug and others probably would have made similar decisions on their own if given the chance, so that keeps me from being very frustrated, but finding out a character has been manipulated all along by some more powerful entity is a plot trope I’ve never been too fond of. I feel the same about prophecies, for similar reasons.

At this point, the series seems to be getting more heavily focused on Pug. I like him, but he’s never been a favorite character. Even though he’s been one of the few constants throughout the entire series, my interest is usually more focused on the less-powerful characters who drive most of the action. The scenes with the long-lived magic users have a tendency toward boring dialogue, with characters reiterating things we already know from previous books or even the very same book in order to build up to new and often scanty revelations.

I like Pug’s sons Magnus and Caleb quite a lot, and I very much liked Nakor, but I’m not a big fan of Miranda. In this book in particular, she kept flip-flopping between being excessively quick-tempered and illogical (her normal state) and being excessively dependent and needy. I particularly didn’t understand why she didn’t take the message about evacuating more seriously or make a more serious attempt to get the ball rolling. She just moaned about how she wished Pug were there to help her and made a few half-hearted attempts to get countries on Midkemia to accept refugees that they obviously couldn’t support. I mean, she didn’t even make the most obvious attempt of going to that bar in the Hall of Worlds to ask around if anybody knew a good world for a few million people to be evacuated to. She didn’t try to organize people in advance so they would be ready when the rest of the details were worked out. She didn’t seek out help from other magic-users, like the Cho-Ja magicians. Even if they weren’t willing to leave their world themselves, they might have been willing to help everybody else leave it. Nothing significant happened with the evacuation until Pug showed up with all the solutions.

I’m rating this at 3.5 stars, but this time I’m rounding up to 4 on Goodreads because it did hold my interest well and moved the plot along significantly. I look forward to seeing what happens in the next subseries. ( )

Het einde van de 'duistere oorlog'. Na al die boeken waarin hij een rol speelde, komen we nu eindelijk wat meer te weten over Nakur. Op sommige momenten werd het verhaal ingewikkeld, maar in het algemeen was het vrij logisch. Het verhaal speelde zich voornamelijk af op een andere wereld (en zelfs een andere 'realiteit').

Een aantal verhaallijnen die begonnen in [b:Magiër|16027634|Magiër|R.E. Feist|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1453032951s/16027634.jpg|21795953] (19 boeken geleden) worden nu afgesloten.

In het begin van deze reeks (of was het de vorige, ben een beetje de tel kwijt) introduceerde Feist een aantal personages (Jimmy, Tad, Zane, Jommy, Servan and Grandy), maar heb het idee dat die later meer werden gebruikt als bladvulling. Af en toe kwamen ze eventjes voor, maar waren daarna al gauw weer vergeten.

Beetje teleurgesteld in de dood van een paar karakters (Nakur, Bek, Erik van Zwartheide, om er maar een paar te noemen), maar misschien was dat wel nodig voor de volgende reeks.

Net als alle andere boeken van Feist aan het einde van een reeks, bouwt ook dit boek weer naar een volgende reeks toe.

(sorry als dit een beetje chaotisch overkomt, maar dit zijn zo de dingen die nu bij mij opkomen, terwijl ik gammel achter het toetsenbord zit te typen). ( )

Note : 6,5/10

La couverture : Illustration par Miguel Coimbra.
Elle aurait mérité d'être un peu plus grande, c'est le cas pour l'ensemble de la série. Mais au moins on ne peut pas louper le nom de l'auteur et le titre. Evidemment on n'arrive à appréhender l'image et toutes les références qu'une fois le livre finit mais elle reste jolie.

L'histoire :
Suite très attendue ! On se rapproche de la fin de l'aventure... J'ai du mal à dire s'il était temps ou si je suis attristée que ce soit bientôt la fin. Cette fois-ci l'histoire se passe en partie dans une
autre dimension (ou autre plan de réalité, notre 1er cercle de l'enfer). J'avais beaucoup apprécié, dans le tome précédent, suivre le cheminement de pensées de Valko, un des habitants de cet autre plan de la réalité. Ce changement de perspective manque un peu dans ce tome, l'apprentissage d'une nouvelle culture, d'autres habitudes. Le tome reste toutefois bien complet puisqu'il s'agit d'une fin de trilogie qui nous avait laissée avec beaucoup de questions.
Je reprocherai encore un dernier point à la forme et pas vraiment au fond (j'ai dévoré le tome, l'histoire m'a transportée jusqu'au bout) : trop de personnages à suivre et du coup trop peu de Pug, Thomas, Miranda à mon goût. Même si je comprends le développement des arcs de Kaspar, Jommy et les autres, j'aurais préféré un meilleur focus sur les trois personnages cités plus haut et pas seulement une figuration pour le Tomas !

Personnage préféré : Ralan Bek. Vous verrez rarement ici le héro de l'histoire (parfois l'héroïne) mais le plus souvent, ce sont les personnages secondaires auxquels je m'attache le plus, ici le trublion Bek !

Personnage le moins convainquant : les garçons : Jommy, Thad... Leur arc n'est pas trop présent cette fois-ci et je ne trouve pas vraiment que leurs interventions soient essentielles à l'histoire. ( )

A somewhat sudden end to the novel for me, continuing to be quite grand and weird in equal measure. ( )