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A review by clarks_dad
Shadows Linger by Glen Cook
4.0
Definitely an improvement over the first volume. Cook builds much better characters and a lot of my complaints about lazy or paradoxical characterization are resolved in the second installment with some introspective narration from Croaker in his Annals. The pacing is as tight as the first book, but the struggle feels much more intimate than the sweeping Lord of the Rings-esque epic between the forces of dark and dark(ish) that tended to impersonally dominate the narrative of The Black Company. At its heart, there's still a lot of mystery in Shadows Linger of the sort that I'm a sucker for. Unexplained lore and mythology are my weak spot in storytelling and there's still plenty of that mystery left in the world of the second book. Characters like Marron Shed add a humanistic element that make the characters easier to identify with and for the reader to establish a more prominent foothold in Cook's world.
A minor pet peeve: the split narration. Multiple first-person perspectives are fine and make a lot of sense to me, but mixes of first-person limited and third-person omniscient are jarring to me and always will be. In spite of this complaint, the third-person narrative gave us Shed and I think that third person just feels better for Cook than his Croaker narration does. Other than that, this is a super solid weekend read. If you're on the fence about the series after the hit-and-miss first book, your patience will be rewarded with this read. It's satisfying on both the personal and plot level.
A minor pet peeve: the split narration. Multiple first-person perspectives are fine and make a lot of sense to me, but mixes of first-person limited and third-person omniscient are jarring to me and always will be. In spite of this complaint, the third-person narrative gave us Shed and I think that third person just feels better for Cook than his Croaker narration does. Other than that, this is a super solid weekend read. If you're on the fence about the series after the hit-and-miss first book, your patience will be rewarded with this read. It's satisfying on both the personal and plot level.