Title: Turning the Storm
Author: Naomi Kritzer
Publish Date: 2003

I think most of the problem is that Turning The Storm is both the second and third books of a trilogy. It feels rushed. It's trying to wrap up all the plot threads from Fires Of The Faithful, plus the new ones it's introduced, and it's just not long enough for all of them to be resolved in anything like a satisfying manner.

Eliana, the heroine, is a young music student who's fled her conservatory after the Fedeli, the clergy who hold most of the power in her country, murder one of her friends and the closely allied Circle of Mages kidnap her roommate, Mira, with whom she may or may not be falling in love. She travels south, eventually reaching the prison camp of Ravenna, where she helps the banned Redentore sect engineer an uprising and finds herself at the head of their rebel army.

That's all in the first book. You'd think that was enough to be going on with, right?

Instead, in TTS, everything gets twice as complicated again. And here lies the problem. In a trilogy, this would be okay, because some of the problems would be resolved at the end of the book, and some would be left over to be dealt with in the final volume. But since this is the final volume, it's just too much. The plot overwhelms the book, and therefore the book underwhelms me.

And honestly, I wish Kritzer had taken the time to make it a trilogy, because while I'm not terribly impressed with her writing per se, her story and her world are extremely rich. There's the whole history of the war with Vesuvia to be dealt with, which instead is tossed off with a reference to the perfume industry — which likewise is never delved into, although it seems to be fairly integral to the national identity. There's the complex political interconnections of the Fedeli order, the Circle, and the Imperial dynasty; there's the religious tension between the dominant religion and the Redentori's Old Way, the subtleties of which she begins to explore in FotF and then just kind of drops. There's the bit about Mira's background, which is not sufficiently set up — in fact, none of the characters with the possible exception of Eliana has more than a sketchy backstory. There is more than enough material for a trilogy, but she tries to stuff it all into TTS and it just doesn't work.

Dang it.

Rating: 6/10