(This post will include spoilers for MST and for The Witchwood Crown, but please don't spoil anything that comes after!)

I'm a huge fan of the original MST trilogy, and I really enjoyed the novellas that came between MST and the new series. I wanted to experience the awesomeness of the new books all at once, so I held off on picking up TWC until the final book came out.

I can't believe how little I liked it.

The Dragonbone Chair is slow, but it is one of my favourite fantasy books ever. This book, in contrast, was downright painful. It seemed to indulge in many of the worst aspects of the genre, including constantly jumping between point-of-view characters and never letting the story get any kind of momentum. The result was a book that was considerably slower and emptier than anything in MST. The creative decision to make one of the motifs of the series (as far as I can tell) be that "nothing ever ends" or "things never change," or something like that, was a really unfortunate one because it cheapened the ending of MST.

It's frustrating that Pryrates' return is teased, but it goes nowhere (yet, of course) because of the (frankly ridiculous) plot-point that Morgan wants nobody to know that he ventured into the tower, and he somehow swears the silence of someone else who really should tell the monarchs about this. That has to be one of the most frustrating things in fiction: when problems are generated because characters who really should talk to each other decline to talk to each.

And I think that the decision to have the Norns as the enemy again was not so great. Of course, it was an obvious decision because the novellas set them up for this and made it clear that there were still hanging in there. But it makes the world and the series feel really small when the author keeps revisiting the same conflicts: the Norn queen has allied with some undead person again, and Pryrates is apparently still around somehow (though maybe not???).

I found the ending with Simon and Lillia compelling, but that was about it. This felt like the worst possible return to the characters and world that I loved so much. Did anyone else have a similar experience?