A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery by Curtis CraddockMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Craddock returns to his gaslamp steampunk fantasy world with a new novel full of intrigue - and at least one cheeky little reference to one of the biggest name authors who helped bolster this book with his blurb, Brandon Sanderson, getting tuckerized into "Lord Brandon Mistwaithe." While the book does a pretty good job continuing the story from where its predecessor left off, with Jean-Claude and Isabelle trying to solve the great ontological mysteries of their weirdly spinning Franco-Spanish-styled worlds, it also proves surprisingly slow paced and repetitive, with not much to make the book stand out compared to its predecessor. It doesn't help that Craddock seems to have gotten some bad translation advice on the French language in this one, with a few pretty glaring errors that kept taking me out of it (most notably, "Le Ville Celeste" - insert Colin Farrell's Penguin doing his rant about the worst Spanish he ever heard, "EL RATA ALADA?!?!") But the finale of this book proves a pretty shocking one - let's just say devout Catholics are gonna take some serious exception to this book's version of the Virgin Mary, even more than, say, any of Jay Kristoff's blasphemous takes on Catholic mythology in Empire of the Vampire. What really surprised me, though, was how the very end set up a case of And Now For Something Completely Different for the finale, which I've already ordered at the library and will soon be reading. Probably after I move, though...
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