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Four Roads Cross A Novel of the Craft Sequence Max Gladstone Books

Download As PDF : Four Roads Cross A Novel of the Craft Sequence Max Gladstone Books

Four Roads Cross A Novel of the Craft Sequence Max Gladstone Books

Four Roads Cross is book five in The Craft Sequence if you read the books in publication order, and the fourth book chronologically. Four Roads Cross is the final book in what I think of as Act I of The Craft Sequence. It wraps up many of the overarching storylines that the other four books have brought up and is the most complex narratively of the first five books in the series. There’s a lot going on in this one. There’s a lot of Craftwork, questioning and committing of faith, and many relationships in flux. It’s a busy book, but that business makes Four Roads Cross one of the easiest of the series to read. At this point in the series, readers are familiar enough with the world that Gladstone doesn’t have to slow down to explain how things work the way he does in books earlier in the series.

Four Roads Cross is my favorite book in the series, sliding in right above book six, The Ruin of Angels.


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Four Roads Cross A Novel of the Craft Sequence Max Gladstone Books Reviews

Strong addition to the series - and continued deepening of the characters from early in the series
This story in this novel follows immediately on the one in the previous volume in Gladstone’s Craft series, Full Fathom Five, and includes Cat, who appeared more briefly in that novel; it also reintroduces Tara and Abelard, who appeared in the first volume of the series, Three Parts Dead. Your enjoyment and understanding of Four Roads Cross will be greatly increased if you have read both of those volumes, preferably recently.

Even if you have, you may find the story a little confusing, as I sometimes did, because it involves three interwoven threads and sets of characters. All, however, are involved with the fact that Seril, the moon goddess who first appeared in Full Fathom Five, is gaining strength and adherents, but She is still weak—and, as such, represents a threat to Kos the Ever-Burning, Her godly former lover, and therefore to Alt Coulomb, the city He protects. Adherents of the powerful Craft, investment bankers whose currency is souls, want to block this potential instability by destroying Seril and, if necessary, Kos as well. Abelard, Tara, Cat, their friends, and the gargoyles who serve Seril must find ways to protect Her, whether these involve legalistic maneuvering or physical battle.

Because so much was going on, I didn’t find this story as emotionally moving as I did Full Fathom Five. However, it provided more details than most of Gladstone’s books about this half-strange, half-familiar world in which religion and economics are so closely interlocked that they form different aspects of a single system. (“The church serves as a bank,” a cardinal of Kos says. “We lend and guarantee and underwrite.”) There’s a hint of Lovecraft, or more precisely of Charles Stross’s Laundry books, in the air at times too the gods are actually “n-dimensional noosphere entities, half-network and half-standing wave,” given humanoid form so that people can more or less comprehend them—but “don’t go too far, since a simulation this detailed is a new cave chamber inside the old philosopher’s cavern, and if you’re not careful you might tunnel into another chamber already occupied by capital-letter Things.”

There are also some wonderful descriptions, mixing metaphor and vivid detail and showing both similarities and differences to our own world. Airports in Gladstone’s universe, for instance, are quite similar to those here—but the planes are dragons. On the other hand, office coffee in Kos’s church is like office coffee anywhere else “grim, nasty stuff, notes of hydrofluoric acid, undertones of charcoal, ground glass mouthfeel, aftertaste of squid.” All in all, I highly recommend this series to anyone who enjoys fantasy with excellent characters, plenty of action, and an interestingly complex background system as well.
Better than the last two installments. When the series focuses on Her a the story finds its way to be exciting.
and more complex as he works along. I'm not sure where his world came from, or where he is taking it, but I want to see the journey through.
I guess you could jump into the Craft sequence here, but having spent some time with Abelard, Cat and the world beforehand will give so much more.
There are cameos and nods across the rest of the series, making this feel somewhat like a season finale, and what a great ride it is.

Dig into action, debate Craft and ethics, theology and family. And marvel at the world.
I liked Three Parts Dead tremendously; but the other books in Max Gladstone's series didn't impress. I came back to Four Roads Cross in hopes that Tara Abernathy would recapture some of that early magic. She didn't.

The plot of Gladstone's books are very similar scrappy, underdog wizard gets caught up in struggle between other conniving wizards and some other, vaguely-godlike-entity, unravels the mystery, and ultimately saves or sides with the vaguely-godlike-entity. All of this is set in a legitimately really neat setting where magic takes the form of legal contracts. The issue is that this plot gets substantially less interesting the more times you read it, and the setting, while inventive, rests too much on novelty to make up for it. I got about halfway through Four Roads cross until I hit the point where I couldn't keep it up anymore.

The nature of the "scrappy underdog caught up in machinations" plot requires certain things, particularly that the scrappy underdog have sharp limitations on their capability (possibly until the climactic ending) in order to keep the drama going. This was *really* hard to buy in this particular instance Tara Abernathy, despite having SAVED A GOD'S LIFE in the prior book, is being paid a really small amount of power by said God, whose employ she is in. This ends up being a big problem for her -- and for the God! -- in NUMEROUS scenes, and really strains disbelief. The lack of power and its risk is even called out in-universe by various characters but rather than do the logical thing and just pay literally the most important person in the God's city more money, her poverty is instead used as a prop to show us how good and noble Tara is for accepting so much less money in order to do the right thing. This was incredibly irritating what is attractive about Tara (and scrappy underdog heroes in general) is cleverness but here is a clever, resourceful character carrying around an idiot ball for no reason.

The idiot ball in general plays too much of a role in the story. Many characters do stupid or careless things that are not really in-character for them; and in general what ought to be an interesting ideological conflict between Gods and Wizards, devolves rapdily into "Gods are great, Wizards are awful". While there is some mystery, I wasn't interested enough in it to keep reading to find out what the secret was.

In fairness to Mr. Gladstone my background is in economics and many of my family are lawyers; it may be that I am too demanding of his magic-is-law-and-what-that-implies setting. You might enjoy the book; but if you are to embark, read Three Parts Dead first; it is much better.
Four Roads Cross is book five in The Craft Sequence if you read the books in publication order, and the fourth book chronologically. Four Roads Cross is the final book in what I think of as Act I of The Craft Sequence. It wraps up many of the overarching storylines that the other four books have brought up and is the most complex narratively of the first five books in the series. There’s a lot going on in this one. There’s a lot of Craftwork, questioning and committing of faith, and many relationships in flux. It’s a busy book, but that business makes Four Roads Cross one of the easiest of the series to read. At this point in the series, readers are familiar enough with the world that Gladstone doesn’t have to slow down to explain how things work the way he does in books earlier in the series.

Four Roads Cross is my favorite book in the series, sliding in right above book six, The Ruin of Angels.