Reviews

Evil for Evil by K.J. Parker

jeffrutherford's review

medium-paced

3.75

chalkletters's review against another edition

dark tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

Evil for Evil tries to be just as clever and complex as Devices and Desiresbut fails to sustain the attempt for the full 730 pages. This is most notable in the character of Duke Valens, who was a staggeringly able leader of his duchy, completely on top of details and second only to Ziani Vaatzes in terms of long-term planning. In Evil for Evil, Valens consistency loses track key characters, motivations and plot points. K J Parker deliberately sends him on a downwards trajectory of competence, but even within the first quarter of the book he asks questions which have been answered in previous conversations. It reads like sloppy editing, rather than intention.

During the middle of the book, there’s quite a lot of meandering around, characters needing to get to places and accomplish plot goals, but little motivation for anyone other than Ziani. Miel Ducas’ aimless drifting is justified within the text in ways that make sense, but aren’t especially entertaining to read about. Similarly, Lucao Psellus’s conversations with Ariessa don’t really accomplish all that much. The reader hopes all this will pay off in the third book, when Ziani’s complicated plot is finally revealed in full, but even so, Evil for Evil on its own doesn’t have nearly as much going for it as Devices and Desires.

Even the significant character deaths have little emotional impact, because everyone is so completely detached from one another. Couples who are supposed to be in love barely exchange more words than couples married purely for politics. Like Devices and Desires, it’s all very mechanical, and Evil for Evil has al the same problems the first book did in terms of prose and female characters. Devices and Desires was tight and compelling enough to overcome those obstacles. Evil for Evil feels like everyone is losing the plot, including real-world entities like the book’s editor and audience.

For all that, I didn’t hate reading it, it just didn’t live up to my expectations. It will be interesting to see whether book three is able to make amends.

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Content Warnings

Minor: Animal death, War, Death, Rape, Violence, and Blood

whatandreawrote's review against another edition

4.0

An amazing follow-up to a recent new favorite of mine. Some people say that second books are the weakest, but I found this one so fascinating with the love quadrangle between Veatriz/Orsea/Valens/Miel, Daurenja's developing role as Ziani's assistant/stalker/rival, and Ziani's continued quest to take political and warfare revenge on the Mezentines. The cliffhanger at the end of this one blew my mind.

jdanforth's review against another edition

1.0

This rating needs at least a little explanation; I dropped this trilogy in spite of loving the writing, essentially because the only surviving characters by the end of this book were people who horrified me. The story is an interesting thought experiment in the limits of love as an agent of destruction. Maybe I'll give it another chance someday.

hazelsf's review

5.0

I liked the scenes in the perilous bog, the amusing observations about the joys of marriage, the introduction of Daurenja and the exploration of humans as necessary evil. I particularly liked the sequence where the Vadani are trying to figure out how to effectively execute prisoners, and another where Miel tries to figure out sewing.

Letter writing is given an importance in this book which is not really continued on in the next which I subsequently missed.

The female characters began to bug me because they are not engaging. I felt like the second half of the book lacked the intermittent humour I need to cope with such a bleak writing style.

joosty's review against another edition

adventurous dark funny informative lighthearted reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

verkisto's review against another edition

5.0

Parker's stories always start out feeling loose, like he sat down with a thread of an idea and just started writing. The further you get into his stories, though, the more you realize how well plotted they are, and that there's no way he could have written these stories without knowing from the start how they would play out. Evil for Evil is a continuation of the story that began with Devices and Desires, and together, they bear out a plot that doesn't exactly keep you guessing, because you never know that you should have been guessing until Parker reveals how all of his threads weave together.

I really liked the Scavenger trilogy, but if Parker keeps this story going the way he has in the first two books, I may have a new favorite Parker trilogy.

shantastic's review against another edition

1.0

I tried. I really did. I couldn't finish this one. There's more stuff about how people are morons for love, which is too cynical of a worldview for me. Also characters I liked before become incompetent and useless, or utterly evil. And the treatment of women does not improve... at least not for the first 73 percent of the book, which was as far as I got. Sorry, KJ Parker. I'm sure you have your fans. I'm just not one.

sashas_books's review against another edition

4.0

I am still not sure whether it was an enjoyable read or not. I like K. J. Parker's writing, the world he has created, the cynicism and dark humour. The latter is absent from the second volume of this trilogy, unfortunately, just like from the first. And I do want a bit of sarcasm, I do want at least a little bit of dark humour in my dark fantasy... Here it's just grimdark, grimdark, grimdark, all the way to the last page (and there is a lot of pages here).
What I enjoyed though:
- Plots within plots within plots within plots and some unexpected developments. (You do need to suspend disbelief when Z is being so very clever all the time.)
- Geekery: more engineering, metallurgy, mining, porcelain-making (of all things ;-)), and falconry.
- The characters are great, even the very minor ones.
One more thing about the characters:
Z was scary in the first book, in this one he keeps getting scarier and scarier and scarier... AND THIS GOES FOR ALL THE OTHER IMPORTANT CHARACTERS FROM THE FIRST BOOK. This was rather difficult for me to stomach. Not that K. J. Parker's other books are full of lovely, kind, sympathetic people - they most definitely aren't, and this is not why I keep reading his work. It's just that there was too much darkness here - imho.
Obviously, I'll be reading the third book. I want to see the resolution.

primoz's review against another edition

2.0

It starts going downhill a bit in the second book, there are more leaps in the story than in the forst one, it's a bit harder to follow sometimes whose story we follow becuase of the jumps. The story does also get streched a bit. But it's nothing like the third book.