Title: Taltos

Author: Steven Brust

Series: Vlad Taltos (#1 chronologically / #4 traditionally)

Genre: Fantasy

Rating: 3/5 stars

The Overview: Journey to the land of the dead. All expenses paid!

Not my idea of an ideal vacation, but this was work. After all, even an assassin has to earn a living.

The trouble is, everyone knows that a living human cannot walk the Paths of the Dead, and return, alive, to the land of men.

But being an Easterner is not exactly like being human, by Dragaeran standards anyway. Thus, the rule doesn’t apply to me… I hope. -Goodreads

The Review:

Intro: Vlad Taltos is a lot of fun. One of the most unique series I’ve ever read, it’s a great mix of high fantasy elements with an accessible urban fantasy writing style. Each book also has a fairly well-contained mystery, so it kind of reads like a detective novel. Overall, it’s a great hodge-podge of ideas that somehow all work together. The author claims you can read them in any order. I personally can’t stand that lack of organization, so a few of us over at Fantasy Buddy Reads are going the chronological route…

…and Taltos (technically book #4) is first in the lineup.

Ten years ago I read the first three (according to the publisher) Vlad Taltos novels and loved my experience with them. Taltos started out with a bang! Reminding me why I enjoyed the books so much. It had a lot of flashbacks, which were deftly woven into the story to enhance what was going on in the present-day sections. I loved reading about how Vlad came to be the quirky businessman he is. However that strong pacing and careful weaving started to fade near the middle of the book.

At one point in the story, I had to check in with my fellow buddy readers because I no longer knew what the heck the characters were trying to accomplish in the present-day sections. There were a lot of scenes where the author wasn’t clear in his description on what had happened, and the ambiguity made a few of us backtrack thinking we’d missed something. Nope. It was just vague.

As the story neared the end, the flashbacks were a constant interruption to the story (we’re talking every couple of pages) which effectively killed any momentum it had, eventually making me apathetic to the entire thing. I finished it. Barely. But had I not enjoyed the first half so much and had I not read and liked a few others in the series, I might have called it quits there. Yikes.

Series status: we’re moving on to Dragon (chronologically book #2) next, and I’m hoping it’s better.

Recommendations: while I’d almost always recommend the most organized route of reading (i.e. chronologically), I’d say the way the publishers have arranged it (with Jhereg as book #1) is a much stronger introduction to this series. With that route, I remember feeling a bit lost at the many people and events referenced that clearly had more solid backstories somewhere, but at them moment I think that’s preferable to the poor execution of the second half of Taltos. We’ll see if that opinion changes as we continue.

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by Niki Hawkes