Dark Age by Pierce Brown
4/5
Despite the 4 star rating I found this really difficult to read. It's a magnificent continuation of the story and shows us new sides to old characters as well as making us fall in love with some new ones. The action sequences are formidable and glorious with the Iron Rain literally taking my breath away and leaving me absolutely shredded and the epic scale of the space warfare topping anything else I've ever experienced. Brown's writing has grown more mature and nuanced with every book and Dark Age is certainly no different with every sentence embedded with meticulous world building that breathes life into the planets themselves. It is hard not to feel like you are right fucking there, in a spacesuit, fighting for your life. Only great books can do that.
There were some things that I didn't so much enjoy. It's dark...as dark can be, perhaps a little long at 800 pages and has so many players that readers may find it hard to track them all. The names of some of those characters didn't help. A chat between Alexander au Arcos, Atalantia au Grimmus, Asmodeus au Carthii and Rhone Ti Flavinius doesn't really flow off the tongue and sometimes by the time I'd sounded out all the names in my head and recalled which one was which I lost track of the central point of their conversation.
That being said there was on thing above the others that made Dark Age difficult to read and it's very simple. It is hard to witness incredible pain and suffering being inflicted on characters we love. Harder still sometimes to see them dish it out to others when we so desperately want them to find some peace. No one gets off easy in this book and much of the death is shown to be as senseless as it should be, even so by the end there was one character who I think I'd happily kill myself.
God knows what the final book will bring us but we've been given a tiny sliver of hope. I'd like to think Pierce has given us his worst however I have no doubt he some surprises left for the finale and we'll all be tearing our hair out again in no time.
