She Who Waits (Low Town)

I really enjoyed this book, but personally it was probably my least favorite of the three. It provides a fitting ending to the trilogy, one that every reader probably knew what was coming, but I still wished it could have been different. I'll avoid spoilers, but I was just kind of disappointed that it ended like I knew it would, even though the climax was very exciting to read. I would have loved a slightly different more unsuspected ending, or something that was a little more ambiguous/open-ended. Still, I really enjoyed my time in Low Town.

Like the previous books, there's the main storyline/mystery in the present, and a series of flashbacks that give a back-story to the main mystery along with more of the Warden's story. For me, this series of flashbacks were the weakest of the trilogy, as they tended to jump around a lot more than the previous ones, and they were about multiple things, (different from Book 1 which was mainly about his childhood growing up with a wizard as an adoptive father along with a future witch adoptive sister, and book two which was mainly about the war and some of his time as an FBI-ish agent). For She Who waits, the flashbacks were all about his time working at Black House with how this related to the drug in the present that was causing people to go insane and murder their loved ones, along with how he became the Warden after his fall from grace (we also finally get to know how/why he was kicked out). Some of the flash-backs were really interesting, but some of them felt a little unneeded. Still, it was great great to learn more about the Warden.

For the main story/mystery, it is again very like the previous books, where there's a bit of an unreliable narrator, as the Warden pretty much knows almost everything from the beginning, but waits to fill in the reader until later. There are some really cool bits with this, where I notice the same things that the Warden noticed (although he didn't come right out and say it at the time), which kind of made me feel like I was more of a part of the story. My only other problem with the story, is that I didn't feel like some of the parts of the book that should have been really powerful, didn't succeed. It just frustrated me, although I did want vengeance to be delivered on all of the characters in the book that opposed the Warden. There were however some very powerful and well written bits with one of the characters that is dying of cancer which really effected me, but then I might be a little more susceptible to it from what happened in my life earlier this year. Suffice to say, Polansky's writing is very powerful at multiple parts in the book.

The world of She Who Waits was pretty much already established in the previous books, and there wasn't too much added here, although we did see more political/religious parties and gangs, which were interesting, although two of the new ones were a little too similar, as they were both militarized religious zealots, one wearing black robes and the other wearing brown robes, but I generally didn't have too much of a problem separating them.

Overall, again, this was probably my least favorite book from the series but it is still an excellent book that I couldn't help but devour. You could just start by reading this book (there are three years between each book, so other than the characters there isn't too much connecting them story wise), but I would definitely advise starting with Low Town, especially since that's sadly the one one actually published in the US (I had to import the two sequels). When I look back, I'd probably have to say that this trilogy is probably one of my top 10 favorite finished series that I've read, I definitely highly recommend it.