At Book View Cafe, this very impressive volume

Nice cover!

This is the final book of the entire Sartorias-deles series. Honestly, that’s hard to wrap my mind around.

The last book in the long series that began with Inda, continued through the Rise of the Alliance, Crown Duel, and The Norsunder War, comes at last to a resonant, deeply satisfying conclusion in Antiphony.

Here’s the full set of novels in this long, long series of interconnected stories. My goodness, wow, looks like Sherwood wrote A Stranger to Command when she was a kid. It does not read like that at all. Nor does it read like MG or young YA. It reads like it’s right at the top of the age range for YA or like an adult novel — that’s the slow pace and lack of adventure. It’s one of my favorite books of hers. It might be right at the top.

HISTORICAL ARC
“Lily and Crown”
Inda
The Fox
King’s Shield
Treason’s Shore

Time of Daughters (two volumes)

Banner of the Damned

MODERN ERA

CHILDREN’S STORIES, (written when Sherwood Smith was a kid) which introduce many of the characters central to later arcs.

CJ Notebooks
Senrid
Spy Princess
Sartor
Fleeing Peace
A Stranger to Command

ROMANTIC STORIES, which mostly stand alone:

Crown Duel
The Trouble with Kings
Sasharia En Garde

RISE OF THE ALLIANCE

A Sword Named Truth
The Blood Mage Texts
The Hunters and the Hunted
Nightside of the Sun

The Wicked Skill

THE NORSUNDER WAR arc

Ship Without Sails
Marend of Marloven Hess
Seek to Hold the Wind
All Things Betray
A Chain of Braided Silver

The POST-WAR books and stories:

Let the Torrent Dance Thee Down
Antiphony
“Beauty” [published in Remalna Stores
“Court Ship” [published in Remalna Stores
“The Art of Masks” [Published]

A lot of these, I haven’t read, especially the others listed under “children’s books.” That means when I started beta reading this series, I didn’t know who most of the characters were. I rapidly developed my favorites (mostly Detlev’s boys, and Detlev) and later got more invested in the overall story.

Earlier this year, I beta-read Antiphony. Here’s my essential take on this long last book:

Everything is over. The good guys won. Now they’re all putting their lives in order and getting set to live happily ever after. The end.

I absolutely loved this book, which is basically a very long epilogue. I just love stories in which characters I already know and like sort out their lives. That’s what this story does. That’s what it’s for. I might eventually go back and read the early stories, particularly since I’ve never read the final versions and I’d be interested to do that. Knowing this volume is coming would lend a deep satisfaction to the other books for me, since I would already be confident in the various happy endings.

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