Sunday, October 30, 2016

Death Weavers: Five Kingdoms Book 4

Death Weavers is the 4th book in the five Kingdom's series. Here, our team spends much of their time with "echos". These are "Spirits" of people after they have died, but before they have moved on to a final place. They can spend as much time as they want in the echo world. However, they do hear a call to go down the river to the exit of the world. Music is a powerful force in the echo world. Different beings have music that signals what they are doing. Different people also hear different music at different times. On special occasions, people can go into the world as "bright echos" who are still alive in the regular world.

The characters also make a trip into a cave of memories. There, everybody that enters leaves beyond an "imprint" of themselves. This clone has all their memories up to the time they went in. However, it does not create any new memories. It freely discourses with others that visit. However, it forgets their presence as soon as they leave. It also has no concept of time, and could easily be there for 5 days ro 5 centuries.

There books has a guest appearance from a few characters from the Beyonders series (a displacer and a seed-man.) I wonder if the final book will eventually join the two series. There do seem to be a lot of similarities in the universes of the two.

In this book, they find more about the nature of the "outskirts" world, how it was created and the danger that the powerful shapers can inflict upon it. Most of the novel is spent in the "echo world", but at the end, the finally rejoin their bodies to continue on to the next book.

The echo world is an interesting take on an afterlife, while also providing a basis for the entire universe of the book. This book suffers somewhat from thinks happening "just when they need to". A horse rushes out of nowhere to rescue somebody. Cole seems to always know just what to do when going through a difficult situation. Even when something doesn't turn out right, there always seems to be a warning in advance. We know that something bad will happen, leaving some of the suspense out of the picture.

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