Locklands

February 28, 2022
Gods collide in the high octane finale to Bennett’s epic fantasy Founders Trilogy, set eight years after the events of Shorefall. The people of the former city of Tevanne have become a collective intelligence searching for a doorway that will allow it to restart reality. The resurrected hierophant Crasedes Magnus holds out, but barely, against joining this group mind while the scrappy spell designers of the Foundryside search for a haven for their refugee fleet. Wives Sancia and Berenice, senior scrivers, try diplomacy to unite the scattered surviving colonies against the mentally unified horde from their former hometown, even if this entails allying with Crasedes, their former archrival. Meanwhile, Clef, Sancia’s intelligent key, recovers his lost memories of how the world was once shattered by hierophants. Bennett advances the plot precipitously and raises his characters’ power levels to the “nigh-incomprehensible,” but the grounding themes of family and love as Sancia and Berenice risk their happiness to save the world, are what readers will take away. Fans will find this a satisfying end. Agent: Cameron McClure, Donald Maass Literary.

Starred review from May 15, 2022
It has been eight years since Sancia, Berenice, Clef, and the band of scrivers lost their friend Gregor to the powerful entity now called Tevanne. Having captured millions of minds across the world using the scrivers' own magical twining technique, Tevanne is intent on destroying everything. The enslaved people are used, with no care for their lives, to power massive flying war cannons that edit one chunk of reality for another to devastating effect. The scrivers group has been battling this unstoppable foe since Shorefall Night, saving as many refugees as possible from the ever-expanding darkness. During their current rescue operation, Clef learns that the brutal, immortal sorcerer who created him--the only person capable of stopping Tevanne--has been captured. A new rescue is set in motion just as painful memories from Clef's past life as a man, husband, and father suddenly begin to surface. The odds of success were already unfavorable, but the determined scrivers are of one mind, with each understanding that any of them may be required to give their all in order to save reality. Jackson provides a poignant but uplifting conclusion to his spellbinding, fast-paced Founders Trilogy, expanding the complex world with more innovative concepts and new characters.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from May 1, 2022
A thrills-and-spills conclusion to the adventures of Sancia Grado. Bennett concludes his Founders trilogy, preceded by Foundryside (2018) and Shorefall (2020), with characteristically high-spirited mayhem. The magic of scriving, which is to say, melding two objects together to form weapons, tools, and the like, has been extended to humans and even whole cities, so that the medieval-tinged metropolis of Tevanne now roams the land, searching for transubstantiation: "Tevanne did not wish to have a body anymore. It had calculated many times that, should it shed this corporeal form, its intelligence should still persist in all the various lexicons and rigs throughout its empire." Against the bad-tempered and ill-intentioned Tevanne stand characters we've met in Bennett's previous volumes, but with considerable attention given here to their backstories: We learn, for example, that the keylike creature called Clef (naturally) once took quite different form, that Berenice and Sancia are more than comrades in battle, and that Gregor Dandolo has more resources than hitherto hinted at. And then there's Crasedes Magnus, who has strong skills as a shape-shifter and, mercurially, is good one minute and bad the next; it's for good reason that Clef in particular harbors deep hatred for him. Some of Bennett's yarn concerns the origins of scriving, a bit of technological sorcery that, often put to bad uses itself, reveals some good sides as well and produces a happy ending--at least for the survivors. Bennett's language sometimes runs blue, sometimes knotty ("The Keyship's espringal batteries wheeled about and sprayed the night skies as the shrieker bolts descended"), and readers will be lost in its idiosyncrasies and the story's plot turns if they haven't read the first two books. The effort to do so is well worth it, though, for Bennett is a master of worldbuilding, and for all the novel's far-fetched moments, everything seems perfectly logical on its own terms. Great fun, with nonstop action and with an escape hatch that would allow--dare we hope?--a sequel.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.