CBR Bingo 3: Time
Shorefall is the middle part of a trilogy and you can definitely tell; everything goes from bad to worse for nearly everyone, good and bad. The time element actually has several applications here: first, there’s a race against time as the good guys Sancia, Gregor, Orso, and Berenice try to stop the return of first hierophant Crasedes who is probably mega-evil, and when that doesn’t work, they discover Crasedes might be able to use scriving to manipulate time, or he’s somehow stuck in time, or he can use time scriving to basically teleport, or maybe some combination of the above. There’s also another time element involved with Clef who had sort of had his time rewound (basically he did a factory reset on himself at the end of the previous book) and Sancia needs him back to his now self. And time may be running out for everyone.
Lastly for the time element, there’s a lot of memories (time past) involved; Gregor is starting to get some of his back, and that could be important; and then there’s the cliff-hanger at the ending when it’s suggested that someone else who has been having memory problems might be getting them back but that said memories might really really change something important.
Needless to say, there’s a fair bit of action, some of it sneaking, some of it fighting, and most of it in service to probably saving the world as we know it. Sancia and crew think Crasedes wants to take over the world and either erase humanity or save it from itself by removing all free will; problem is, their best shot ally, Valeria, a creation of Crasedes’, may or may not end up being as bad as he is supposed to be.
None of this would be interesting if the characters weren’t at least a little interesting ,and thankfully, everyone is. Just about everyone is facing up to something big, and there’s a lot of uncertainties for at least the two characters who get separated from the group by the end, and I definitely want to know what’s happened to some of them. Sancia herself who was the main character in the first book isn’t quite as much the focus here, and it sort of show since she doesn’t change much personality wise but she does in other ways. The group and Valeria come up with a plan to combat Crasedes that essentially involves using Sancia’s scriving abilities (they’re special, see book 1 for details) to combine her consciousness with someone else’s basically making them telepathic between each other, so thought sharing, feeling sharing, and so on. At first this isn’t too bad since Sancia and the first person they try this with like each other, but then it starts turning almost in the Borg. Any time someone new is brought into the collective, suddenly it’s the best thing ever and they want everyone else to someday be like this too. This strikes me as 1) ominous, and 2) annoying since it becomes basically the solution to every problem (bring in someone new!).
I don’t think the time skip either at the beginning of this book or the one that supposedly begins book 3 are all that necessary since there’s not much sense of time having passed between this and the precious, but I guess I’ll have to see if the time jump to the next book works out.
