[Dragaera] two words about _Good Guys_ (spoilers)

[Philip Hart]

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G

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A few random observations on first reading:

Rarely is a title so central to a book.

On page 12, "I mean I heard nothing" for "I mean heard nothing" really 
threw me.  I didn't know at all what was going on, and I wondered for a 
while if the speaker had been there, or perhaps had some sort of foiled 
clairvoyance.  Otherwise the book seemed very well edited.

The combined first and third person narratives didn't work for me. 
Maybe this was the best way to tell the story, but, well, I never 
cared much about Nick.

Actually I didn't care that much about Susan, either.  Perhaps the 
dispersal of POV contributed to that.  This made the latter part of 
the novel a bit less motivated to me.

A lot of the POV organization didn't a first reading feel very Brustian 
to me - I'll have to go look at _Cowboy Feng_ or _The Sun etc_ - except 
for _The Incrementalists_.

Getting back to the title, I think I enjoyed the book more having read 
it than reading it.  The degree to which the moral path is obscure is 
really interesting.  I thought the dismissal of Elsa at the end 
undermined this, though maybe without that the novel is too much grey.

A few aspects of the novel reminded me of Benedict Jacka's Alex Verus 
series, which I recommend.  It has some Vladian qualities, with a 
narrator who undergoes a lot of growth in rather varied settings, and 
some interesting moral shading.

The bits where Marci is doing magic seemed even more Zelaznyan than the 
usual equivalents in the Vladiad.

I didn't understand how magic stayed out of government hands, unless 
there's an active effort to make that happen by magic users, but I 
didn't see how that fit given the structure of the two main groups.  I 
guess I should say "military" not "government" - the scenes with Matt, 
which I thought were very well done, brought that to mind.

This is more of a thriller or spy novel I guess than a fantasy; I don't 
know if I missed a lot of references to various tropes.

I've long been meaning to comment on the Shadow Unit series, also a 
procedural, which has a great deal of powerful writing I don't intend to 
revisit any time soon.  Certainly SKZB fans interested in his wider 
circle should check it out cautiously.