Just finished Ian Tregillis' The Rising.

Holy Shit.

The first book was good, but this book is excellent. Tight, extremely fast moving, action-packed, this book escalates everything to a new level.

Also Tregillis can write a convergence! A small one, but a good one ​ ( )

Even though there were some things I didn't love about this book, I STILL REALLY LOVED THIS BOOK. I can't help but love Berenice so much, she's so arrogant and resourceful and clever and really fucking lucky. It was nice to get to see Longchamp's perspective as well. I wish there'd been some more about Queen Mab and the Lost Boys - I can only hope Tregillis will get into that in the 3rd book, because there's so much there that could be explored!

This book included a lot of battling...there were a lot of descriptions of fighting and shooting which either I just can't follow very well or Tregillis doesn't write too clearly. I had the same issue in the first book, when Jax is on the airship, where the descriptions weren't enough for me to actually picture what was happening. Also, Tregillis likes to repeat certain descriptions - explosions tend to rattle people's teeth, the word "limned" was used at least 4 times with regard to people's eyes (as in, "panic-limned"). Overall, I think this was a weaker book than the first, but I really love the universe it's set in, and I love the characters we're following, so pretty much anything they did was great to me. Plus I know this is 2nd in a trilogy so I'm saving my real expectations for the 3rd! Though I'll still probably love it even if it doesn't get into all the stuff I want it to. ( )

You know, I just can't tell whether this novel just happens to have solved any of the issues of the one directly prior to it, whether I preferred it because it was filled with a lot less outright torture, whether this just happened to tickle all my funnybones at exactly the right time, or whether I've just gotten used to the writing style and it just doesn't bother me anymore.

Any way I look at it, though, I loved this second novel. I had no issues with any of the main characters, even if mr. robot suddenly changed his name to Daniel. Wtf? Anyway. It doesn't matter. He's still awesome.

Longchamp turns out to be one hell of a military leader and the blood and guts sections are mercifully spread out and don't overwhelm the flow of the text. That being said, it injected quite a bit of life in the tale.

Berenice, as untrustworthy as she is, made a truly interesting and wonderful addition to this novel. I liked her much better here than in the first, but that may be mostly because she redeemed herself by the end of the first, at least as a cool character. :)

More than anything, the denouement of this novel was truly fantastic. It's one thing to have disparate characters doing their own things for wildly different reasons, but it's essential that the whole package gets giftwrapped and handed to us, the eager readers. What can I say? The payoff was DELICIOUS.

There were a TON of great reversals and high-tension moments throughout the novel. It is a gem of pacing.

But most of all, the end of this novel was what I expected to happen at the end of the first novel, so now, all my faith has been restored. Hell, I wouldn't have minded at all if [b:The Mechanical|20980667|The Mechanical (The Alchemy Wars, #1)|Ian Tregillis|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1408923929s/20980667.jpg|40357895] and [b:The Rising|25318815|The Rising (The Alchemy Wars, #2)|Ian Tregillis|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1436968284s/25318815.jpg|45051607] get re-released as a single novel. Or who knows, include the third in as well, once it gets released. And then we'll all sigh a grand sigh of relief. :) ( )

Like any good middle story in a trilogy, this one is dark and hopeless. Jax escapes only to find that freedom is elusive. Beatrice jumps out of the frying pan and into the fire more than once. France hangs in the balance... It's a bleak ride. ( )

The Rising does what every second act in a trilogy should do: it fleshes out the story whilst making the reader impatient for the third instalment. This eagerness to read The Liberation, the third book in Ian Tregillis' new trilogy, comes not from cheap literary tricks but because the writer has created such an engaging world. He has also described this world he has created so eloquently: there are quite a lot of great similes, even if Tregillis does occasionally have a tendency to overcook his prose. Surprisingly, however, this rarely gets in the way of pacing and time spent reading The Rising just flies by.

It is more action-heavy than The Mechanical, the first book in the series, as things are in motion now. The war has kicked off – with a great set-piece battle in the New French capital – and the various players are all trying to achieve their own ends. This is gratifying for readers who are rewarded with plot developments every time they turn the page, but I do confess I missed the Dostoevsky-lite psychological angle that so elevated the first book in my estimation (Father Visser is barely present here). The closest we get are hints of a schism in the rogue/freed Clakkers: that there are many of the mechanicals who won't be happy with just freedom and will want vengeance on their human former masters, or even to subjugate them like Visser. But, in contrast to the first book, Tregillis doesn't seize the opportunity to address the moral and philosophical implications of this and prefers (by the scope of this single instalment of the trilogy, at least) a simple free-the-slaves narrative. Perhaps, in the interest of keeping the plot nice and lean, he is saving such thoughts for the third book: I have a feeling that the 'liberation' in the title of the third book won't be smooth for the characters and will involve more blood than bunting. The Rising is a breakneck instalment, sacrificing some of its predecessor's nuance in favour of getting from A to B, but a variation in tone is not necessarily a bad thing for such a composition. ( )