<Backyardiggans purple guy screaming at the sky image>. Ah, it's so good.

It reads very much like a third book in a series of four. If book 1 is exposition/teasing what might come of the world being built, and book 2 is the entrance to violence/demonstration of the actual powers at play, then book 3 is edging allout warfare by moving the chess pieces around (which it pretty much openly tells you is what's going to happen in the book).

About halfway through, we're told the date that war will happen, and so this book is a lot of mobilization and preparation. It's like a drawn out trial of Tyrion Lannister ("I did not kill the king, but I wish I had").

Sides in the war start to solidify, and it's a good thing too, bc for the hundred or so moving characters you have to keep track of across 10 factions, it was getting ever so slightly difficult to tell who was motivated by what.

However, I think therein lies the rub of this series. There is so much going on, so many characters, and so much story to be told all by the same narrator who has his own motivations, that it seems like you'd necessarily be out of the loop on a lot of the goings on in the world, but the story tells so much, so well, so succinctly.

Ada Palmer is steadily ruining my ability to read non-good fiction. In the span of 350 pages, she tells a story grander than all/most books twice the length I've read on this list so far – and with more depth than several of them. This book is ever so slightly less exciting than book 2, hence the quarter point difference, but I wouldn't even feel like "you're paying for some build up for an awesome fourth book finale" because this 8.75 is still incredibly captivating and good. Definitely a page turner, I think I milked this whole book in like 2.5 days.

The development of the narrator is so good in this book too. Though you're told that he's a reformed mega criminal, and this only occasionally bleeds into his commentary in the first two books, he breaks a couple times in this book and it's so juicy.

Development of the existing characters is also excellent. In a world where it seems like there's too many ultragod characters, I feel like you ought to run into scope creep (feeling this way after Words of Radiance), but there's 5+ super powers in this book and they all feel powerful in distinct ways. Mycroft, Bridger, Achilles, Apollo, Sniper, JEDD, Cato, Thisbee, all of the Utopians, Papadelius... It reminds me of Watchmen where you have some super humans some literal gods, a weirdo Dr. Manhattan character, and more – they're all of nebulous power levels thus far, and I just know that book 4 is gonna blow some socks off

Also there's literally pacific rim canon in this series

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