So I’ve been a big fan of Daniel Abraham. The Long Price Quartet is great, the Dagger and Coin books are great, his M.L.N. Hanover urban fantasies are great, and of course The Expanse is great.

Which meant that I felt some kind of way when Age of Ash, the first book of the Kithamar Trilogy, was… dull. I just kept being surprised that it was by Abraham at all, because it didn’t have any of the richness and complexity that I associate with his works. It was straightforward, simple, just incredibly basic — Fisher-Price’s My First Epic Fantasy.

But it wasn’t actively bad, so I went on to the second book, and oh okay, now I see it. Because this book starts off on the same day as the first one, and tells essentially the same events again, but from a different perspective. This not only adds new layers to the narrative, but also fundamentally changes it, and rewrites what we thought we’d been seeing.

It’s a cool structure, and a neat experiment to tell a story that way, but I’m not sure it’s fully successful — because the problem is, when you take a rich and complex story and then strip it down into layers to tell it the way Abraham does, you end up with (as we saw) a boring and too-simple first book that you need to kinda trudge through before you get to the richness and complexity. Which is not an ideal way to hook a reader, and which — even when the reader is hooked — leaves them having spent a lot of time with a relatively dull narrative before they got to the good part.

But for me personally, there’s an even worse element here: Retelling the same day in this way requires the reader to be extremely familiar with what’s going on. You can’t understand the significance of an event’s recasting if you don’t remember in detail how it was originally cast. And the third book in this series is not yet published; by the time it is, the first two books will be multiple years in the past for me, and I will remember them only hazily and at a high level. That level of recall is fine for continuing on with a story, but not nearly good enough for this sort of elaborate revisionism. And due to the comprehensive nature of the revisions, even reading a summary probably won’t get me there; I might just need to actually re-read the things, which then doubles up the problem of the first book being dull. (Maybe I should try reading them out of order the second time, to get the full impact of the mental recasting on the first book?)

Without having read the completed trilogy, I can’t yet say if this experiment pays off enough to make it worth it. I have a lot of faith in Abraham as a writer, so I’m optimistic that it will, but this one is placing a larger demand on the reader than most of his other books. Either way, though, you should absolutely 100% not read this series until it’s done.