#elayne kevarian

[hiddenschools]

Ms. Kevarian drew close to Tara, and her voice dropped to an urgent whisper. “Beware of Alexander Denovo. I’ve known the man for half a century. I haven’t trusted him so far, and I don’t know any reason to start now.”

“I will do more than beware him,” she said. “I’m going to beat him.”

“Good.” Ms. Kevarian’s words were sharp and quiet, like footsteps in a distant passage. “But remember, your first duty is to our client, not revenge.”

“If I have to raise a god from the dead to defeat Alexander Denovo,” she replied, “I will raise a hundred. I’ll bring Kos back ten times greater than he was.”

“Well said.”

Three Parts Dead, first book of the Craft Sequence

[kurashikeys]

oh im loving this trio

[kebelesaurus]

you people are mistaken if you think that I’m awake and celebrating  anything that I’ve become

elayne is the best and i thank max gladstone everyday he introduced that wonderful, scary, fictional woman to me.

@pythionice here u are!

[boyangart]

a younger Elayne Keverian (LOL just a inaccurate character sketch, she’s confirmed blond lol) 

[adragoninspace]

I'm rereading THREE PARTS DEAD and Elayne Kevarian makes me think of Kathryn Janeway so much.

[abronzeagegod]

"A witch?" Ms. Kevarian said, bemused. "I'd think you'd give me more credit than that, Ms. Abernathy. Riding broomsticks, consorting with unholy powers. Who has time for sure pleasantries anymore? Why I haven't been on a date since the late eighties."

Three Parts Dead, Max Gladstone; Elayne Kevarian laughing at Tara’s choice of insults

[veliseraptor]

hey, sorry if you've already made this but do you have a rec list for female anti-heroes? or anti-villains? or... just fiction centring morally complex women? I'd just really like to read more lit like that but I don't know where to start :/

I don’t remember if I have done this! And the answer is…fewer than I’d like, alas. But let’s see what I’ve got. (A number of of these are series, which I’ve listed by the first book and noted.) I’m always looking for more of these, though, so if anyone has recs…

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth Trilogy)

Really any of NK Jemisin’s work would qualify, but I’m going ahead and going with this one. The main character(s) is a remarkable piece of work, and this series as a whole is just…incredible. Her realization especially of mother/daughter relationships and the complexity and possible ugliness thereof is really…augh. I cried at the end of the third book. (It also does great things with themes of oppression and power and dehumanization while telling a great story.)

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett (The Divine Cities Trilogy)

Mostly I think the protagonist of the first book (this one) fits what you’re looking for best, but this whole series is aces and the second book also features an excellent protagonist who I think you might like. And the worldbuilding and thematics of this series are also just *kisses fingers* so consider this a general rec, too.

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone (The Craft Sequence)

I love this series, I really do. Taking place after the God Wars, in which the various gods of the world were overthrown by human sorcerers, not only is it super conceptually interesting with a lot of themes I’m personally really into (imperialism! religion and the relationship between humans and gods!) but also some really excellent complex female characters, especially the protagonist of this book, Tara, and my personal favorite, Elayne Kevarian. 

The Queens of Innis Lear by Tessa Gratton

This is a retelling of King Lear and it’s one of the best retellings I’ve read in a while (I love reading retellings but I’m very picky about their execution). One of my favorite things about it is the way it brings Goneril and Regan (here Gaela and Regan) into prominence, keeping all their sharp edges while making them full characters, sympathetic and understandable. 

Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente

I love this book. I love Catherynne M. Valente’s prose, and this is probably my favorite of hers that I’ve read so far. It’s a retelling of the Russian fairy tale The Death of Koschei the Deathless blended with the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and it’s...really good, and Marya Morevna is a fantastic protagonist. It’s been a bit since I read this one, but from what I remember I think she fits the bill for what you’re describing.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson (The Masquerade)

Fuck man, this book. Fair warning that it is brutal in a lot of ways - don’t come into it expecting to leave without some bruised emotions. But the main character is a glorious example of what you’re talking about. And I don’t want to say more than that, because this is kind of a book it’s good to go into without spoilers.

I’m just gonna go ahead, too, and throw in a couple of Ancient Greek plays that have two of my favorite morally complex women. Obvs they’re going to come with misogynist baggage because Ancient Greece, but I’d say they’re both worth a read.

Medea by Euripides

This was actually my first Greek tragedy and I fell in love hard and fast. It’s a seriously elegant piece of work - Euripides had a reputation as a misogynist but he writes really good morally complex women, imo. And Medea in this…dominates. She owns the stage and the story, and god damn does this do the work of making her ultimately murdering two people and her own children not…totally (at least for me) remove sympathy with her. And she gets away with it. In a motherfucking dragon chariot.

Agamemnon by Aeschylus

I wrote a paper about how Clytemnestra owns this play - she drives the action, she takes charge, the men around her are relegated to helplessness and impotence - the only person who stands against her at all is Cassandra (who, of course, no one listens to). I don’t like the rest of this play cycle nearly as much as the first one, but this one…hoo boy. I could talk about this play, Clytemnestra, and the gender stuff with Clytemnestra in this play for approximately forever. Also murdering Agamemnon with an axe is, as the kids say, a #big mood.

[theherocomplex]

My dad is always regaling me with the tales of his forays into the zombie section on Kindle Unlimited (it is...depressing, in many ways), so I bought him the first five books in The Craft Sequence (which occasionally have zombies, so I figured it would be an easy sell). 

He powered through all five of them (”I didn’t want to go to work, because I’d have to stop reading”), thinks Elayne Kevarian is the best, and is now trying to decide if he’s going to read Ruin of Angels next, or Annihilation. 

Next up: I’m getting him Ninefox Gambit. 

[servantofclio]

Recent Reading: Last First Snow

So, if I haven’t been writing a lot this summer, what have I been doing? One thing I’ve been doing is reading.

I read the first three books of Max Gladstone’s Craft sequence relatively quickly (the first in publication order, at least -- Three Parts Dead, Two Serpents Rise, and Full Fathom Five), and then put off Last First Snow because I knew it was going to wreck me.

Last First Snow, though published fourth, is a prequel taking place 17-20 years before the other books, and featuring characters who, in the later books, are inscrutable mentors, employers, or antagonists, to the younger protagonists.

This book, however, gives full attention to that older generation of characters as they attempt to clean up the messes lingering from their own war-torn youth, so you get to see a lot of Temoc, a reformed warrior-priest; the King in Red, a lich-CEO with a grudge; and Elayne Kevarian, the necromancer-lawyer who’s trying to mediate between them and other parties as they confront problems of gentrification, popular protest, and human sacrifice.

I highly recommend the series as a whole, and this would not be a bad entree to it, though there is more clear exposition of the world system in Three Parts Dead. I think you get enough here to understand what’s going on, and of course you’ll be in more suspense regarding the outcome than if you’ve already read Two Serpents Rise. Well worth reading in either order, though.

Spoilers and further discussion after the cut, also spoilers for Two Serpents Rise.

If you have read Two Serpents Rise, of course, you read all of LFS with a lingering sense of dread and forboding, because you know that eventually things are going to shit, that Temoc is going to mark his son and abandon his family, and that things are going to burn. I still found the book very effective and explaining why those things happen -- in TSR, Caleb has his own explanations for what happened, and doesn’t much care what Temoc has to say; seeing Temoc’s actual psychological struggle, and his efforts to make peace, is moving and painful. Elayne also comes more vividly to life, though I’m fascinated by the intensity of her moral compass, given what we’re told of her actions during the God Wars. I’m really curious what events in the intervening years made her who she is in this book.

Reading LFS gave me the urge to reread TSR, which was a bit of a trial; that book is my least favorite of the series, because while I enjoy Caleb and Teo, the whole femme fatale plotline makes Caleb look incredibly gullible and frankly kind of stupid, and also makes Mal pretty opaque. The desire to reread it in light of LFS was strong enough, though, that I did a fairly quick spin through that book.

The reread was worth it; with LFS fresh in my mind, it’s so clear that Caleb, Teo, and Mal are all the children of the Skittersill Rising, their lives bent and warped by that event in so many ways. Every interaction between Caleb and Temoc becomes more laden with feeling. The brief glimpses of what the Skittersill is like now raise questions about how effective the deal made in LFS truly is.

Even the King in Red gains new dimensions when the books are read back to back; the King in TSR is more reflective and less aggressive than in LFS, making one wonder if he has regrets about his actions at that time. You wouldn’t necessarily expect to see character development from an immortal skeleton necromancer, but it’s there.

[rhetoricandlogic]

THREE PARTS DEAD BY MAX GLADSTONE

LIZ BOURKE

ISSUE:

26 NOVEMBER 2012

Three Parts Dead is a debut novel to make you sit up and take notice. In recent years I've read a bare handful of debuts as mature and accomplished as this one. I've read a bare handful of novels, debut or not, that succeeded not only in being this vibrant and this inventive, but in bringing the vast majority of their disparate and sometimes hectic strands together into a successful conclusion.

Three Parts Dead is a wild ride that sticks the dismount, is what I'm saying.

Novice Technician Abelard is on duty in the sanctum of Kos Everburning, the god whose divine power drives the city of Alt Coulumb, on the night when his god dies. We first meet Tara Abernathy plummeting a thousand feet to earth, after being cast out of the Hidden Schools for her Craft—although not before her teachers graduated her. She staggers back to her farm community roots for a time, the losing party in the fight of her life, before the timely arrival of Elayne Kevarian, senior partner in the firm of Kelethras, Albrecht and Ao, who whisks Tara away from the consequences of meddling in helpful necromancy too close to her neighbors. Kevarian is in want of an assistant, or an associate, because she has been engaged to deal with the business arising from the death of Kos. A god's obligations, in Three Parts Dead, don't end with death.

Gods, however, made deals. It was the essence of their power.

. . . When a goddess neared death, the needs of her faithful, and of those to whom she was bound in contract, stuck like hooks in her soul. She could not desert her obligations, nor honor them and remain intact. The tension tore her mind to shreds of ectoplasm, leaving behind a body of inchoate divine power that a competent Craftswoman could reassemble into something that looked and functioned like the old goddess. But . . .

Well. Much like Tara's revenants back at Edgemont, a being once resurrected was never quite the same. (pp. 66-7)

The power of gods is bound up in deals and contracts, agreements and promissory notes. Elayne Kevarian has been retained to look after the interest of Alt Coulumb and Kos's worshippers in the matter of his resurrection. Perforce Tara must assist, both in discovering how precisely the god met his end and in defending his remains from the claims of others—others represented by Alexander Denovo, a Craft practitioner whom Tara has met before, for he was responsible for her near-fatal departure from the Hidden Schools.

But there's more going on in this fast paced, tightly plotted caper. Where would a legal thriller—and Three Parts Dead is recognizably a legal thriller, of an astoundingly innovative, fantastic bent—be without dangerous undercurrents, complicated history, and unreliable allies? Soon after her arrival in Alt Coulumb, Tara finds herself an interested party to the death of a judge who had some past association with Kevarian. Investigating the judge's demise leads her to Shale, one of the Stone Men—gargoyles, who are now despised and hunted in Alt Coulumb, but who formerly enjoyed a very close relationship with the goddess Serit, Kos's consort before the so-called God Wars—and to Cat, Abelard's friend, one of the Blacksuits intimately connected with Serit's successor, Justice: a shell of power resurrected from the dead goddess by Craft practitioners much like Kevarian.

There is always more here than meets the eye. Dead gods and dead judges prove to be connected in unexpected ways. Alexander Denovo proves a compelling adversary, the more so since the depth of his involvement in what's going on in Alt Coulumb is revealed only slowly until the climax.

Gladstone builds an intriguing world, a secondary world fantasy that's both recognizably modern and imaginatively, invigoratingly magical. He does so skillfully, incluing rather than infodumping, revealing the depth of background naturally in service to the story. References that initially seem off-hand, a bit of color added to the scenery for color's sake, take on additional significance with each new revelation, creating the impression of a tightly plotted novel within an expansive world. His characters are real, complex, and human even in their inhumanity. Perhaps the most complex character here—apart from the intriguing and opaque Kevarian—is Cat. As a Blacksuit, when she's on duty, she's part of a single entity that thinks and acts according to one will—Justice's. Off-duty, she tries to fill the absence left behind via ever more dangerous highs: she's a vampire junkie. This too is important to the story, to what Justice is and what she isn't; what Kos was, and what he will be if Denovo gets his way.

Slowly, the reader is led to realize that Justice, as much as Kos, is at the heart of this story. Justice and the injustice done in Alt Coulumb at the end of the God Wars. The climax lives up to the build-up, and the payoff is worth the ride: this is a book which intrigued, thrilled, and delighted me by turns, and had me cackling in righteous satisfaction at the conclusion.

Three Parts Dead has some flaws, on balanced examination. The at times hectic pace and the author's refusal to spell out all his complications and recomplications make it necessary for the reader to keep her wits about her: too much inattention, and you'll be flicking back pages to make certain you've caught what's going on. But it ultimately rewards that attention: this is a seriously good book, and Max Gladstone is a writer to watch out for.

[hiddenschools]

Wait, when does that happen? A Craft Sequence timeline

Being published out of chronological order has confused the hell out of many Craft Sequence readers, myself included. So I went through the series and figured out an approximate timeline and all the main characters ages YOU'RE WELCOME.

...and then I found an official version in the inside cover of the German translation but shhh mine's better

[craftworkaesthetic]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Craft Sequence - Max Gladstone Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Elayne Kevarian, Izza (Craft Sequence) Additional Tags: Nightmares of Drowning, Prophet Children, creation myths, New-made Gods, Legal Entanglements, Bureaucratic Labyrinths Summary:

In the beginning there was the Word, which burned. As Izza raises a new religion on the ashes of Kavekana's idols, she must learn to navigate the labyrinth of bureaucracy that could protects her new goddess--or entrap her.

[dragoncharming]

"Language, Elayne." "My apologies," she said after another sip of vodka. "One gets carried away when one feels one's dinner companion has made an inexcusable moral error."

Three Parts Dead - Max Gladstone

[abronzeagegod]

There was no one in the room to see the momentary slouch of Elayne's shoulders, the bow of her head. No one saw her set the scroll down and lean against the desk. Of the four million souls in the artificially brilliant city beyond her window, not one saw her bend. Nor did they see her head rise and starlight blood from her eyes and from the numberless, fractally dense glyphs upon her flesh, shining through her body and garments as if they were fog. The room darkened, and smoke rose from the parchment where she touched it. Her wrath broke, and she shrank within her skin and was nearly human again.

Three Parts Dead, Max Gladstone; Elayne Kevarian is not happy to hear from Alexander Denovo

[abronzeagegod]

"War," she said. "It sounds so normal, doesn't it? So pretty." That last word blighted the air as it left her throat. "A few bodies impaled on a few swords, some bright young boys skewered by arrows, and done. What we did, what was done to us, was not war. The sky opened and the earth rose. Water burned and fire flowed. The dead became weapons. The weapons came alive." A gleam appeared at the Sanctum's pinnacle as a novice set lanterns for the evening. Their light reflected off Ms. Kevarian's flat eyes. "Had Kos joined Seril at the front, she might not have died. We might now have won. If you can call anything that happened in that... war... winning."

Three Parts Dead, Max Gladstone; Elayne Kevarian reflecting on the God Wars

[abronzeagegod]

Elayne burned in the city’s stead. Fire crowned the Skittersill and would have eaten it but for the Aberforth and Duncan deal; Purcell’s firm, meanwhile, tried to pull free of its obligations, and would have succeeded but for Elayne. She bridged the fire and the firm, and the two met in battle, on her and through her. She was too far gone to scream. Fire could not consume wood and brick and stone, so it torched instead through her mind. The iron-wrought cages where she locked her memories melted. Images long discarded, moments of weakness and pain chained in dim corners, broke free, and she: was a twelve-year-old girl hiding face down in cave mud, breathing moss and much as a mob poured past the cavern mouth, torches n their hands and whiskey on their breath. She tasted fear and bile and ice-cold anger. Run, she had to run, but could not - and wouldn’t it be better to crawl into the dark and remain, and grow twisted more by shadows? was fourteen and killing for the first time, with a simple steel knife in those days of sorcery, entering a man’s ribs again and again and again, the shock of his body’s weight through the steel as he bore her down. was the snow that fell on Desedeil Lex for the first and last time, and left smoking holes in stone. Gods died in the sky, pierced by thorns of light, as Crafsmen clad in war engines marched through the city’s wreckage. Stench of motor oil and blood, saltpeter and ozone, brick dust and sand. Life’s million colors faded black and white from soul-loss as she staggered from her war machine down an alley, fatigues bloodsoaked, her eyes shining and her body wet, toward where Temoc lay impaled. was a body in a dim-lit room n Alt Coulumb, given away from herself, robbed even of the right of rage. City lights outside the window, sharp as instruments of torture, while in her soul’s depths delicate mad hands gripped the roots of love and pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and willed them to come loose. was a hundred moments of pain and defeat, anger and sorrow, innocence lost, and none mattered, because from each she had emerged stronger than before, welding out of horrors new truth, new determination. To be what? Professional? Successful? She was both, she’d been both, and here she stood, saving a city’s bones even as its people died. She had grown strong. But what world would had she built with her strength? A world where she saved what could be saved and left the rest to rot?

Last First Snow, Max Gladstone