Weeks, B. (2008). Shadow's edge. New York: Orbit.

12/17/08 to 12/28/08
***
This is the second of the Night Angel trilogy, and my impression of the book is very similar to the first. Again it took me quite a while to get into the story (about 140 pgs), but once I was there I had a hard time putting it down. Weeks does an excellent job presenting fully formed, impressive female characters that are more then just paradigm fulfilling shells. However, Kylar again has a number of mushy, cliched moments that made me squirm a little bit. Weeks is also continuing the pattern of jumping from one portion of the story to another. While I understood the necessity of this in the first books, it felt more overdone here. For instance there was one battle that was presented from the perspective of six traveling mages whom we had never heard of before and whom I cannot see having a prominent place in any future portion of the story. Rather it felt like a literary conceit to enable Weeks to give an overview rather than a first person account of the battle.