Dust of Dreams

Executive Summary: I found this to be a disappointment. It's not a bad book by any means, just not the book I was hoping for.Full ReviewSo here we are in the home stretch of this epic 10 book series. Mr. Erikson starts this with an author's note saying how this is really part one of a two book finale to the series.That colored my expectations some that we would start getting more answers than questions and that the new characters and subplots would be kept to a minimum as we finally start to wrap up what Mr. Erikson has been building for the last books.I guess I can hope that it happens in [b:The Crippled God 8447255 The Crippled God (The Malazan Book of the Fallen, #10) Steven Erikson https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1320388198s/8447255.jpg 13311158], because I certainly set myself up for disappointment here. Once again Mr. Erikson writes some amazing chapters and an exciting climax. Unfortunately there is also an abundance of chapters, characters and subplots I just didn't care about. This series suffers from far too many minor characters that could often be interchangeable with one another and Mr. Erikson spends too much time for my liking with them.As with previous books, I found the chapters focusing on the Malazans themselves to be the most fun and interesting. This has some of the best scenes and events in the series thus far, and somehow that just makes me mad. I look at those and wonder “why couldn't the whole book be like this?”.This has been a much more negative review than I had originally planned to write. Especially for a 3 star book. There is a lot to like here, I just wish there was more of it. More of my favorite characters. More cool battle scenes. More badass magic. More answers to questions. This book has me pretty apprehensive for the final book and how Mr. Erikson is going to wrap things up. Maybe that book will help to better put this one in perspective. Or maybe it will take a re-read for me to appreciate the chapters I found uninteresting on my first read through. Only time will tell.