Finished book 4 of JV Jones' Watcher of the Dead series. This was the best book of the series in that the preceding were too negative and this was more positive. Finally some very positive things are happening for Raina. Raif is now extremely powerful and even has a sex mate. Effie also has real power and her situation isn't so gruesome as it once was. I think actually that Mace was not even in book 4 at all??? He's been off at war.

The right level of injustice balanced against something positive, like the hope that results from aces up the sleeve, etc is not so easy to manage. It's understandable that things will look grimmer in the beginning and gradually become more positive. Such was the case with Rothfuss and his second book, and so on in these sorts of books.

Now starting Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Refreshing. Most would say it's on a higher level than the Jones series. Not really so though. The social norms are more complex, because it's only a slight variation of reality. If you're going to make an entirely new world with entirely different social norms, it's just too much to make them very complex. So then, the Sull for example end up way too crude, the only other way forward would be for Jones to do a better job at finding something in them that appeals to us humans instead of trying to emphasize that they're totally alien/foriegn.

One thing I dislike of Jones is that she has her characters using sayings occasionally that just don't belong. The world is not earth. Why would someone say "easy peasy"?