Max Gladstone, Mur Lafferty, Margaret Dunlap & Brian
Francis Slattery Bookburners: Complete Season One (Serial Box, 2016)
Some time ago I had the opportunity to read the first 3
installments of this serially told story.
Now I am able to read the “rest of the story” as Paul Harvey would say.
For a quick recap, Bookburners
is an installment based story written by a variety of authors. I suppose I
think of it like a TV show with weekly episodes each written by different
people. Our heroes are a secret group working for the Vatican who travel the
globe and try to contain (& bring to their secret library) various books
that actually are magic.
The more that I think about Bookburners as a whole, the more things that seem to bother
me. For such a lengthy piece, there’s
surprisingly little character development.
While some characters are explored, others are never really taken out of
the box.
Second, the concept itself feels a bit tired and dated.
While it’s not bad on its own, it does just seem like a dozen or so other
things I’ve read or watched on TV in the last year or so.
Finally, there just wasn’t a compelling plot forcing me on
to the next installment. In order for
something like this to really work, it has to have a forceful, compelling
plot. And I just didn’t feel that. Perhaps structurally there were not enough
cliff hangers between installments? Anyway, it made it way too easy to put
down.
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