Senlin Ascends: Book One of the Books of Babel

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All of this sounds as if I'm preparing you for disappointment. And I'm really not. It's a great book. An easy 5*.

Marya jumped in her seat when a camel’s head swung unexpectedly near. Senlin tried to calm her by example, but couldn’t stop himself from yelping when the camel snorted, spraying them with warm spit. Frustrated by this lapse in decorum, Senlin cleared his throat and shooed the camel out with his handkerchief.Bancroft, Josiah (3 November 2019). "The State of Book Four". The Books of Babel . Retrieved 29 January 2020. Things are not so dramatic. In many places, the rot is hidden behind either stone walls or glamour. The fall is less literal and more figurative. Indolent Voleta functions as a figure showing that what keeps us alive also slowly kills us. Adam’s heart gets drafty so that the ultimate conformist can become a revolutionary. Every single character is an epitome of ignorance or privilege that come in many different guises, from loyalty to blind allegiance, from leadership to self-serving exploitation. This way, truly, the only one enemy is the complacency and the piously small desires for a life of certainties that preclude any grand aspirations so inherently endowed with risks. Of course, we need to ask, is Mr Bancroft referring to some imaginary edifice, or is he describing our own world? I have found terrifyingly apt parallels. Senlin is determined to find Marya, but to do so he’ll have to navigate madhouses, ballrooms, and burlesque theaters. He must survive betrayal, assassins, and the illusions of the Tower. But if he hopes to find his wife, he will have to do more than just endure.

Answers: As the author says in the beginning of this book. All the questions raised in the previous books were answered. The Tower of Babel is sometimes called the Sink of Humanity. Its immensity, the variety of its ringdoms, its mysterious and luxurious heights are irresistible to all comers. We are drawn to it like water to a drain.Aboard the State of Art, Edith and her crew adjust to the reality that Voleta has awoken from death changed. She seems to share more in common with the Red Hand now than her former self. While Edith wars for the soul of the young woman, a greater crisis looms: They will have to face Marat on unequal footing and with Senlin caught in the crossfire. The main takeaway is that The Fall of Babel does its job admirably. We get the worldclass prose, the wit, the observation that we've come to expect. We get large doses of our favourite characters. Mysteries are unraveled. Endings are given. There's a little bitter in the sweet, but you need that or the sweetness would be cloying. The problem was the decision to spend the entire first third of this book focused on one POV, that of Adam. Look, I don't dislike Adam's character, but he was maybe my least favorite of all the POVs. With the way the Hod King ended I really wanted to keep reading about the other characters, especially those who had such climatic endings in book 3.

No spoilers, but this adventure that gave us more Senlin and a great deal of Adam and others as well, is satisfying in a way that all huge epic fantasies can be. If you've loved the series so far, you will definitely love this as well.bined into a single, fluid reflex. He’d long suspected that she had been overly hard on him when they’d sparred, but now he knew just how The truth is, that the effort of giving endings to all these people, plots, and mysteries, places an extra burden on the story. And the fact that it carries on at a jaunty pace beneath all that is highly commendable. If you wander off, we’ll meet again at the top of the Tower,” she said with exaggerated dramatic emphasis.