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.