holy crap! i need the next book! ( )

Do not read this review if you haven't read the first two yet. If you're reading this to see if it's worth getting into the series, the short answer is yaaasssssssssss. This series and book so far aren't all roses though. The characters largely have little personality and the author continuously beats you over the head with the fact that the Sa'Ba Taalor follow their gods unquestioningly and without hesitation. Overall, still very good and haven't had this much flat-out fun with a series in a while.

So you have your regular everyday humans, and then you have the gray-skinned, glowing-eyed, multiple-mouth-having, Sa'Ba Taalor. In the first book you're largely dealing with the mystery of what the Sa'Ba Taalor want. By this point it's very clear what they want, and it isn't peace and harmony. The only thing with that is, and I don't know what this says about myself, I'm not so sure they so easily labeled the bad guys. The people who murder women and children who have surrendered, will not stop until they destroy all of the humans and their cities, and show zero mercy. And still, if you had an (what you believed to be) infallible god speaking to you and giving you direct and specific orders, would you not follow them believing that in the end you would see why they were right to want what they ask for? I mean even as someone who doesn't believe in a god or gods, I can say, if an infallible god was speaking to me (and I wasn't insane) as they were the Sa'Ba Taalor, I'd trust in their own wisdom and judgement over my own.

That's, to me, what makes this story so interesting. On one hand you despise these gray folk for what they're doing. On the other, I cant help but wonder, do the gods know more than both "races" and actually have a good reason for all the evil they're bringing about? There's still one book left so the jury is still out on that, though as it gets deeper and deeper in, it's seeming less and less likely that there's anything positive that could come of it all. ( )