Re-Reading Cassan Astor and the Harbinger’s War: A Slow Build With A Great Finale

I have completed my entire re-reading of the Cassan Astor series (read the last several posts in the blog for my other entries). Books 1 through 4 are now fresh in my mind.

So… what did I think?

Before I get into that… first of all, a note on the previous book, Cassan Astor and Immortal King. In my thoughts on that book, I’d mentioned how it had a clunky middle. It was really quite wordy! And while I think portions of Harbinger’s War are wordy as well, the problem is not nearly as bad. The Immortal King is just a wordier book, which might partly explain its larger page count.

So on that note, I already notice an improvement. The writing style is better in my opinion. It feels less robotic, less “high school writing assignment-y.”

Apart from somewhat more succinct writing, I think I ultimately like this book better. Not because it’s entirely entertaining or because it has the best character moments. I think Sea of Krakens still takes the trophy for both of those categories. But what the Harbinger’s War does well – better than any of the other books in the series in my opinion – is its slow build with a great end-of-book payoff.

The Harbinger’s War takes awhile to get going. Admittedly, it’s not the most entertaining right away, certainly when compared to Sea of Krakens for example, which starts off with a bang! No, Harbinger’s War starts off largely with characters wandering around in the snow trying to figure out where they want to go. It’s not the most compelling of starts. And even when things get going, it takes awhile for the action to pick up.

But pick up, it does! The action in this book is like a gradual slope that starts low, but continuously and consistently rises until it hits the top of a towering incline! The rising action is far more linear than any of the other novels in this series so far, so much so that when the action really picks up around the 3/4 point, I did not want to stop!

For those who want the book spoiled, I’m talking about the moment that Vaduz gets assaulted. From that moment on, I was hooked. Didn’t want to stop.

And what makes that moment – and the rest of the book from then on – so compelling is all the little, seemingly innocuous, unimportant bits that came before it. Conversations about loyalty between minor characters like Rom, Fulco, Corvus, or Walter, might seem slow and boring earlier in the story, but become all the more relevant once the fighting starts at the end of the book.

Seeing places we’ve come to know and love – particularly Konin Palace – overrun and destroyed is also heartbreaking. Places of stability, of confidence, now destroyed.

So… the end of this book? Excellent. It’s a great finale.

I think the character work is still better in the first two books. There are so many characters now that it’s a bit harder to get in those emotional character moments, but having this be the fourth in a series, most of the characters are well-enough understood at this point for the major character legwork to be done already. That is to say, I don’t feel as if it was missing. Now if Harbinger’s War was the first book in the series, well, that would certainly change things.

Just like you wouldn’t wonder who Iron Man is by the fourth Avengers movie, we don’t need to spend all the time to go through every one’s motivations. That allows this book to be much more plot-heavy.

Some negatives – this one had more typos than normal. I counted 11 typos and one content mistake. While I said in previous posts that I won’t address content, only typos, this content mistake was glaring enough that I do think a correction is necessary.

The abundance of errors I spotted might be a result of the rushed nature of this book. This book took little time to write. I was excited and energized when writing it, of course, but I do think it needed at least one more proofread. I do think I put it out perhaps prematurely.

In any case, all errors should be remedied in a new correction. You can see the new correction come out soon.

Now… going back to an earlier point…

I mentioned earlier that I had some issues with the clunky-ness of the previous book, Cassan Astor and the Immortal King. Again, while I said that I did not want to address content issues, as time has gone by, I’ve started thinking that there is a particular chapter that I might want to update. I’m not saying I will do an entire rewrite, but just a considerable overhaul of how the chapter is written. I know this is a big thing. I’ve never retroactively changed a part of a published book before beyond updating a few small typos, but it’s been weighing on me and I do think that after I make these typo and content changes to Harbinger’s War, I want to go back to Immortal King next and change one of the chapters.

The challenge for me will be to make these changes (making it less clunky-sounding) while also maintaining the current page count. If I mess up the number of pages, it will affect the spine thickness of the book, something that I would rather avoid, as reformatting the artwork for the cover is a hassle. That said, I think I can find a way to make it work.

More on that later.

In the meantime, if you would like to read Cassan Astor and the Harbinger’s War, you can find it now on Amazon.com