This Gulf of Time and Stars

4.5 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary With the Clan finally and formally part of the Trade Pact, life is getting back to normal. But now a complex plot is targeting Clan members, and the survivors must find safety - perhaps by going back to their mysterious origins.Review While A Thousand Words for Stranger is likely the book that introduced me (and many others) to Julie Czerneda, and I liked that initial trilogy, it was actually the prequel trilogy that I enjoyed more. Here, in this final trilogy, she brings the two worlds of the Trade Pact and the isolated planet Cersi together. And does so in what I found a really satisfying way. Lots of mysteries resolved here, and yet it's just book one of the new set!I put off reading this for a long time, because I only had a NetGalley PDF in my library, and I hate reading PDFs, let alone fixing up conversions. But I started on a reread of the whole series earlier this year, and then reading Czerneda's A Turn of Light fantasy brought me around to finally digging into these last book. Ironically, after some pain reading and time spent fixing a conversion of this book, I literally just now found that I did, in fact, buy an ebook copy – 6 years ago! – and could have spared myself a lot of time and effort by just downloading it (which is why I do buy e-books rather than convert PDFs).In any case, I really enjoyed this. I don't know that it's the best of the series so far – Sira and Morgan continue to be a little too sickly sweet to each other – but it is the most satisfying. There are riddles yet to resolve (e.g., the Watchers), but I've seldom seen a book tie up quite so many loose ends so smoothly. I have some quibbles – some of the info comes out a little too easily, and the end feels rushed, but if you've enjoyed the series so far, you'll like this quite a bit.

I read this without realizing it was actually part seven of a nine-part series. That was probably a mistake; as a result, it took a long time for me to grok who the characters were and what was going on. That aside, Czerneda's prose is impeccable as always, and the concepts and conflicts facing the Clan are interesting enough.

This Gulf of Time and Stars was my first Clan Chronicles book. It took a little bit of time for me to get into, mostly because a lot of the humorous scenes toward the beginning didn't mesh with my own sense of humor but also because I didn't understand a few things early on due to not having read previous books. However, it made more sense later and I did enjoy it–and now I do want to both read the earlier books and find out what happens next!

7/10 - Liked it

Full Review: http://www.fantasybookcafe.com/2015/11/sci-fi-month-review-of-this-gulf-of-time-and-stars-by-julie-e-czerneda/