Access Today The Way Of The Rose (Everien, #3) Written And Illustrated By Valery Leith Presented As Publication

was an experience. I picked up this book without reading the first two because everything about it sounded crazy and I thought it would be a fun experiment, So if you're reading this to figure out if you should read/continue the trilogy, just stop now because I won't be able to do this book justice,

I'm gonna start by saying that reading the final book of a trilogy as a standalone is very unfulfilling, I had no connection nor care about any of the characters since I had no idea what they had gone through already and I only had a vague idea of what they were trying to achieve.
There were also quite a few character POV to follow along with, at leastthat I can think of straightaway, plus maybe a few others that only lasted a chapter or two at the most.
Luckily everyone had unique enough names that it didn't make things confusing, but I'd be many chapters into the book and suddenly introduced to a new POV, Since there was no main character and no clear lines of good or bad though I understand not all fantasy books are like that I didn't know who to root for or even care about.


The world building of this book, and probably of the trilogy as a whole, was intense so much so that I was barely able to follow along at many points in the story.
Just when I thought I was understanding some concept of the story, something new came along and threw me for a loop, I'm not even sure the main location of this book Everian actually exists and had people living there at any point in time, Of course any story with time manipulation is going to be complex, but there were elements that I just never understood, even with big information reveals at specific points in the story.


The plot kind of dragged for me, mainly because again I didn't know what the plot was supposed to be, but the story did pick up towards the end.


Overall, the story wasn't too bad treating it like a standalone, but this definitely was not the right book to try this experiment with, In a land torn apart by evil and time, a woman warrior emerges as the only hope for survival, . .

Everien is in chaos, ravaged by a voracious timeserpent that can tunnel through earth and time itself calling forth terrifying monsters from the depths of Everiens past and leaving barriers of time distortion in its wake.


The Pharician warlord Tash and his conquering armies have been thrown into confusion by the timeserpents attack and now must battle both the growing rebellion of the Clans and the stubborn inconstancy of this newborn world.


But the key to victory in Everien is the ability to pass through the timeserpents barriers and navigate the shifting sands of the lands memory, To do that, the woman warrior Istar must harness the power of the fearsome Sekk and the sorcery of the ancient and elusive skyfalcon, Only then will she reunite her land and triumph over Everiens haunting past,

Yet Istar must first learn the truth about herself and tread a path fraught with heartbreak and peril if she is to knit herself, her companions, and Everien back together again.
I loved the finish to this trilogy, Leith takes a very convoluted storyline and wraps it around and in on itself with a fair amount of deft consistency, Possibly Grietars end was too neat, and Iend was not the most satisfying, but it was a neat twist, I could have used a little more of Isisters just generally they were fascinating characters whom I would have enjoyed more of, However, I really loved Jaya and Tarquins ending and it was obvious that everything else was secondary to their storyline, So it wasnt perfect and I think I really loved the second book best, But it was good: Leith kept up a wellpaced, gripping, engaging prose throughout the series which is not something that can be said of all trilogies, And I loved Liaku what a superbly created character, All in all fantastic.and a half. third book of the trilogy called Everien, this whole set is an unusual fantasy, written under a pseudonym presumably to distinguish it from her powerful sf genre work by the writer Tricia Sullivan.
the trilogy seems to have been written as one book, and then chopped into three roughly equal parts for publication, so that the finales of the first two books, arbitrarily set, are not written as such, which does not, let's say, encourage the reader to persevere.
and the trilogy subject matter, time paradoxes, are not exactly a common theme in fantasy, as a result, reading the series can be confusing, and the fact that the landscape, the characters, and the plot are continually changing under the weight of chaotic time as it is engineered by a host of forces does not make it an easy read.
Glen Cook's Black Company and Steven Erikson's Malazan books are the only books i can think of that have used time as a chaotic force in similar ways, and neither of them have made it the central conceit.


i would not say the trilogy necessarily works right through, because it is not always coherent, and it needs to be read as a single whole, but i advise persevering just the same, for one thing it is interesting as a minor sidelight to Sullivan's major standalone sf works, all of which are important, for another it features some interesting and well differentiated female characters, acted on by two male characters over time who are really archetypes, because they are portrayed as the inverse of one another.
thirdly, there's a lot that's pretty original along the way: a primitive clan culture, a decadent empire, an upstart interim king, a sentient bird culture specializing in communications, and a secret alien cult, all trying to seize power by coopting an advanced but longdead civilization that tried to codify magic.
what

with the chaos, all these elements begin to intersect, and as they act, destabilize the world, which becomes stratified into strips of land belonging to different times and places, which can only be traversed by a kind of bone magic.
Pen name for sitelink Tricia Sullivan, Pen name for sitelink Tricia Sullivan, sitelink.