Gardens of the Moon Nearly Broke Me (Then I Loved It)

i tried this book three separate times before it actually stuck, and i am not even a little embarrassed to say that, because apparently that’s basically everyone’s experience with Gardens of the Moon. Erikson just drops you straight into the middle of an empire’s history mid conversation, no hand holding, characters talking about events from a hundred years ago like you already lived through them, and for the first hundred fifty pages or so i genuinely had no idea what was happening.

somebody in a review i found compared it to walking into a friend’s house where a d&d group is already three sessions deep into a campaign and you just have to sit there and absorb it, which is, honestly, the single most accurate description of the reading experience i’ve come across. and it makes sense once you know the world apparently started life as a roleplaying game before it became novels, that origin explains a lot: the sprawling cast, the sense that ten other stories are happening just off the page and nobody’s going to stop and explain them to you.

the thread that actually got me invested, more than the sieges or the mages, was the Oponn stuff, the twin god of chance and its coin flipping games with mortal lives, that whole plotline felt genuinely unresolved and strange in a way i haven’t stopped thinking about weeks later. i also kept the Dramatis Personae bookmarked the entire read. no shame. everyone does it.

it’s slow, it’s dense, i wanted to throw it at a wall more than once during the first act, but the back half moves and the payoff is real. four stars, and i’m already a little nervous about book two.