The Sunless Countries: Book Four of Virga

3 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
Leal Maspeth is a history professor in a country that's trending more and more authoritarian and stifling. Hayden Griffin, legendary sun-lighter, is visiting her country for his own reasons. Both become entangled in an adventure that literally takes them out of their world.

Review
I greatly enjoyed the first three books of the Virga series; Schroeder created a fascinating world and fairly deftly outlined the arcs of three core characters. In this fourth book, however, he stumbles a bit.

To begin, we start with a brand new character in a new region of Virga. While protagonist Leal eventually links up with prior characters, much of the book feels quite divorced from the preceding arcs. And where Schroeder does link them up, through the relationship between Leal and sun-lighter Hayden, it's awkward and unfulfilling. It feels like Schroeder has made the barest of required gestures toward a (completely unconvincing) romantic relationship – banking more on expected tropes than actual character development – and I found the whole thing more irritating than interesting.

The story as a whole is also fairly muddled in terms of both plot and worldbuilding. We hear about Virga inhabitants with vague names that Schroeder does little to distinguish. Even partway through, I constantly had to remind myself which was which among world wasps, precipice moths, capital bugs, and wraiths. Even when we do finally get outside Virga itself, which should have been a tremendous climax, the mood is so flat and underplayed that I hardly cared. It's not even really described very well, in contrast to Schroeder's excellent work in preceding books. The result is okay, but not great.

All in all, treat this book as a somewhat unfortunate bridge book between a very strong start (though trending down) and (what I hope will be) a similarly strong finish.