⋙ PDF Unholy War The Moontide Quartet Book 3 9781780872025 Books

Unholy War The Moontide Quartet Book 3 9781780872025 Books

Download As PDF : Unholy War The Moontide Quartet Book 3 9781780872025 Books

Unholy War The Moontide Quartet Book 3 9781780872025 Books

The characters grow , develop new skills, survives more adventures. One of the things I really like about this book is its slow pace, none of the abilities is acquired overnight (even with magic), distances take time, relationships take their time.


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Unholy War The Moontide Quartet Book 3 9781780872025 Books Reviews

I enjoyed the previous two books in these series enough that I would have given them three stars, but UNHOLY WAR is unfortunately where the weaknesses creeping throughout the series finally develop into problems severe enough to bring the rating down to two.

The biggest problem with the Moontide Quartet is that for a story ostensibly about a religion-driven world war, Hair seems to have no idea (beyond cheap fundamentalist stereotypes) what sincerely devout religious people are actually like in real life, nor to have any sympathy for or understanding of religion in general as a human activity. The only sympathetic protagonist who professes any religious faith in its own traditional form is Ramita, the ersatz-Hindu – almost every other character, from protagonists Alaron, Elena and Cym to supporting cast like Antonin Meiros and the Ordo Costruo mages, and even villains like Gurvon Gyle, Huriya/Sabele or the Empress Lucia, is either explicitly atheist or agnostic or, like the ersatz-Muslim Kazim, abandons much of their faith’s strictures over the course of the story. This anti-religious mindset extends not only to the depiction of the world’s ersatz-Christian “Church of Kore”—a false faith invented by the survivors of the magical ritual that gave the mages of Yuros their powers, and known to be so by virtually any Kore cleric we see—but to the other fictional faiths as well; almost any priestly or religious character, whatever their faith, is depicted as a fundamentalist fanatic whose actions inevitably worsen the situation, and the faiths themselves are all, with one exception, hotbeds of misogyny, parochialism and bigotry with very little examination of what they actually preach or why real people might believe them to be true. (Hair’s fictional Crusades are also a complete mischaracterization of the nature and intent of the real historical Crusades, but I will cut him slack for that as it is a far more common mistake.) The only benevolent quasi-religion in the setting shows up in an ersatz-Buddhist/Jainist monastery, whose monks are also explicitly atheist in practice. This theme has been present throughout the entire series, but only in UNHOLY WAR is it hammered home with enough frequency and heavy-handedness that the story begins to suffer as a result.

Almost as disruptive is the fact that the vast majority of the protagonists—entertaining, appealing and sympathetic as most of them are—either think, talk and believe as if they were all raised in the most sexually liberal enclaves of the post-Sexual Revolution West, or rapidly acquire that perspective once exposed to it. In keeping with the general characterization of “piety = bigotry,” the only character who views her sexuality through a lens that is both positive and religiously informed is, again, Ramita the ersatz-Hindu, whose culture created (as a minor Yurosian character notes in Book 1) this world’s equivalent of the Kama Sutra. Anyone who espouses anything remotely similar to classic standards of chastity is depicted as either a hypocrite or a bigot. (The biggest fight that occurs between lovers Elena and Kazim, for example, blows up not over the fundamental clash of her being an infidel by his faith, but over his faith’s condemnation of same-sex relationships—and the way this fight is written, it could have been transplanted to a New York coffee shop with barely a tweak to its dialogue and emotions.) While this is not atypical for modern fantasy, it has been done with much more artistry and much less one-sided ham-handedness, as for example in Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series; for myself, I found it simply knocking me out of the “otherworldly” mindset for which I treasure not only fantasy, but good historical fiction as well.

The series is saved from its annoyances by its undeniable strengths its characters are vivid, its plot fast-moving and action-packed and its magical system fascinating in its own right for those who enjoy that type of worldbuilding, and the writing is competent enough to mostly keep out of its own way (though the occasional clunky 21st-century-isms do turn up). I will, it must be admitted, almost certainly read the last book when it comes out, though I will be doing so in the hope/gamble that Hair will have too much plot to wrap up to further indulge his obvious proselytization hobbyhorses.
Excellent sequel
Good story. Can't wait for the next book.
I deeply enjoyed Unholy War! Now that the world has been created, Hair could spend more time developing characters into what the readers want to see, and building the plot lines into webs of inter-locking brilliance.
Wish this trilogy was more popular. Hard to get his books
Unholy War continues the various storyline from the previous book, with the action getting denser by the page. If you like complex stories, an engaging magic system and a long book, this is the right read for you.
The detailed and imaginatively crafted saga continues with conflict on all sides. The characters continue to develop in often unexpected ways much to the readers delight.
The characters grow , develop new skills, survives more adventures. One of the things I really like about this book is its slow pace, none of the abilities is acquired overnight (even with magic), distances take time, relationships take their time.