The Crow Read-A-Long and Questions

[Becky]

Sounds all right to me

[Becky]

Its going good, but I'd forgotten how dark and heart wrenching The Crow was compared to The Gift and The Riddle.
Also what are people's thoughts on the splitting of Maerad's and Hem's adventures into two separate books?

[Chris]

Becky wrote: "... what are people's thoughts on the splitting of Maerad's and Hem's adventures into two separate books?"

I rather suspect that Alison Croggon intended the Pellinor books to be a trilogy, with the middle book interweaving Maerad's and Hem's strands, one in the frozen north, the other in the arid south. At some stage she may have decided that that would make it too unwieldy, or that the parallels between each narrative were too close, and so split it into two.

If that's the case, I think it largely works: we do invest in Hem as a character as much as Maerad, and the necessity for the two to be together in the final denouement makes it fitting that we follow them separately before.

The only clue I can suggest that this might be the case is that gift, riddle and singing are all abstract concepts while the crow is an actual non-human character, a hint that Croggon was a little stumped for coming up with another abstraction for the third book's title.

[Becky]

Do you think it would be beneficial to have a timeline of events so that you could know what Maerad and Hem were doing at the same time? I don't know about you but I can't ever seem to get their two stories to fit into one neat little series of events. In my mind Maerad has all her adventures then goes to Pellinor and only then does Hem start doing stuff, which I know can't be right.