All right, so you remember the Craft Sequence, right? Max Gladstone’s world about urban planning and student loans, all set in the shadow of a war between the gods and incredibly powerful near-immortal skeleton wizard lawyers?

If you haven’t read it, then a) go on and read it, but b) you should absolutely stay away from Dead Country and Wicked Problems, which are the first two novels of the Craft Wars.

The series starts at a small scale, with a personal story: Tara Abernathy, who we are of course familiar with from previous books, is going home to deal with some family things. And this book is going to stay small and personal to a large degree, in a way that’s characteristically excellent, but also not a little bleak at times. (This isn’t exactly Gladstone’s pandemic novel, but it’s not not his pandemic novel.)

But even as it’s dealing with the small personal stuff, it’s setting up some really huge things — there are problems that were hinted at in the previous Craft Sequence novels, and they’re getting more urgent here. And in the second book, this all bursts to the forefront: Instead of a small, character-focused novel, we now have a giant sprawling epic that brings together characters from all the other books and pulls them into the same fight.

That the two books differ so much in tone and subject is arguably a structural problem for this series, but given that they’re individually excellent and work well together, I can’t really take it too seriously as a flaw. This series is off to an excellent start, and I look forward to where it goes from here.

(Of course, because I’m writing this entry something like a year later, I’ve already read the next one and I know where it goes from here; I was tempted to pull the third book into this entry, but I want to at least keep all my books logged in the proper year, even if I don’t write my entries in a timely way. So you’ll just have to wait until I get closer to realtime on my backlog to find out what I will have thought.)