Last First Snow is the fourth book in Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence in publication order, but the first chronologically: it’s set in Dresediel Lex, the desert city of fourteen million where Two Serpents Rise (which was the second book, both in publication order and chronologically) also takes place. I wouldn’t recommend starting the series here, but I would definitely recommend the series as a whole, and this installment felt particularly satisfying, maybe partly because I was in the mood for a fast/exciting read.
The Craft Sequence is set in a world of gods and magic. The backstory is that four decades prior to the events of this book, the people of this world fought the God Wars, a series of conflicts that set the old gods and their worshippers against the Craftsmen and Craftswomen, who are basically magicians who want humans, not gods, to drive the world. The magic in these books is interesting—it involves knives and glyphs and wards to protect places or people, but the underpinnings of it all look a whole lot like contract law: there are Craft firms that look a whole lot like law firms.
So, right: in this book we’re in a familiar city, with familiar characters: Craftswoman Elayne Kevarian; the Craftsman/skeleton known as the King in Red, who rules DL; Temoc, the last of an order of priests loyal to the old gods; Temoc’s son Caleb, who’s a child here but whom we know as a grown-up in Two Serpents Rise. Like the other books in the Craft Sequence, this one opens with a problem. A neighborhood of Dresediel Lex called the Skittersill is still protected by the wards of the old gods, even though those old gods are dead or dormant. Because it’s a divine protectorate, land in the Skittersill can’t be bought or sold while the wards are in place. But without the gods, the wards will someday fail, leaving the neighborhood open to the dangers of various disasters (fire, famine, plague, etc.). Elayne is working with the King in Red and a businessman to negotiate a deal for the Skittersill, a proposal to replace the gods’ wards with new ones made of Craft, which will make the newly-solidly-protected neighborhood more attractive for development. But it’s a neighborhood, a community, and some of its residents, who are mostly poor, aren’t happy about the proposed deal, which doesn’t take their wants and needs into consideration. So an argument about capitalism and gentrification is part of what’s at the heart of this book. The parties negotiate, and that’s part of the plot, but then the chance for peace/agreement is threatened by an act of violence that escalates into a full-on clash between protestors and the police, with the King in Red trying to demonstrate his power, and the way that plays out takes up a fair chunk of the book.
I mostly really liked the pacing of Last First Snow, though there were a few parts that felt like they dragged a little—maybe it’s that I was most interested in the parts of the plot that focused on Elayne, so the parts of the book in which she’s absent felt slower to me. I like how we get to see the various parties involved in the conflict and pieces of their viewpoints and pieces of why they hold the beliefs they do, why they act the way they do. I like the bits of humor: at one point when Elayne tries to talk to the King in Red, his reply is that he’s “busy smiting,” to which her reply is “smite later” (183). I like the excitement of the fight scenes, even though fight scenes in general are not my favorite thing to read. And I like how Gladstone manages to write lyrically about the everyday parts of a city in conflict: people swing-dancing in a park in another neighborhood, billboards and traffic jams and people living their lives.
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