Middle entries in trilogies are hard. There is a reason why “Middle Book Syndrome” exists.



In Empire of Grass, the second installment of The Last King of Osten Ard (itself a sequel to the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn “trilogy” that inspired writers from George R.R. Martin to Patrick Rothfuss), Tad Williams manages to kick the syndrome through the cure of sheer obsessive planning and some crafty edit work.



It is a good book. More: it is a great book, a stand out for me in what could be a packed year. So, if you wanted the most spoiler free review possible, that is it—It Is Good, Very Good, click the red X. But lend me your eyes a bit more and I’ll keep this as spoiler free as possible.



How did a good-or-great middle book happen, let alone one with such expert pace? Williams’ own first trilogy has a good second book, Stone of Farewell, but one that suffers from a slow opening and a mind-boggling amount of locations and characters after a first book mainly focused on a single character whose naive eyes slowly reveal the world. Like most second entries, Stone of Farewell is character and world heavy, but only moves the overall story forward at the end.



In Empire of Grass, there are no new POVs. There are no new plots that require chapters of setup to establish locations and players. It just picks up, sometimes moments after the end of The Witchwood Crown, and moves on.



This gives the trilogy the feeling of an actual trilogy, of what that used to mean in the genre: it’s a single story in three parts, not three stories that form an even bigger story.



Keeping it spoiler free, some scattered reactions:



If you didn’t like Morgan in Witchwood, you might like him a lot more here. I did. (More interestingly, his arc is more about the ways he is not like Simon - the hero of the first trilogy and his grandfather. ) Two characters traveling with each other begin to flip characterization until each seems to become more like the other person, and it’s left completely to the reader to realize instead of being obnoxiously sign posted. There are sad, personal little betrayals of trust that feel as heavy as any other fantasy novel’s thousand man massacre. Humor, too.



The themes of volume one are just as present as before. The past repeating itself, the young taking up old vendettas, and the same old mistakes being made are most notably crystalized in a line where a character sees destruction that gives them deja vu about events in the original trilogy that “the past had returned to burn the future.” But the broader ideas also expand to new directions, including the role of women in the world, both as heroes and villains and everyday women. There are other big ideas, too:





“Saying peace never lasts, or that an empire must grow or die, is like saying that only birth and death matter,” she told him. “Most of life is not part of either, but what comes between–the simple hard work of living.”

The overall thrust of the narrative has more adventure than book one. Even in the final action set piece that plays us out, Williams simultaneously sets the stage for a new mystery that could lead to a huge, huge twist. This volume ups the stakes considerably, its ending pages effectively conveying how totally overwhelmed from every angle, internal and external, the cast is to the point where the final pages hit me with a tangible feeling of how beaten down some of them are, enemies at every turn and doom behind every door.

Of course, this being a true trilogy that feels like one story sliced into three more bindable volumes, it ends with a series of cliffhangers for each POV, and if you found the twists at the end of The Witchwood Crown making you wish you could pick up a second book, they pale to the ones here as the book builds to an apocalyptic panorama approaching a Hironymous Bosch painting in scope and fury and strange beauty.