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rocky41_7) wrote2025-12-16 08:44 pm
Recent Reading: The Tomb of Dragons
Time and circumstance conspired to keep me from reviewing the second book in the Cemeteries of Amalo book, The Grief of Stones, but today I finished the third book, Tomb of the Dragons and I do have time to review this third and final book in the trilogy.
This is NOT a spoiler-free review.
Tomb of the Dragons retains much of what I loved about the first two books, including Thara’s character and his investigations into the underbelly of Amalo, with a healthy helping of Ethuveraz politics.
Thara is having to adjust to the events at the end of the last book, and here, I feel, is where we truly see how important his calling is to him—how he handles losing it. It gives some good perspective to why he is so dogged in pursuing his work goals—his calling really is his sense of purpose, his life. Watching Thara grapple with this change and its indefinite consequences was fascinating.
However, it also retains in greater measure some of the things that I didn’t love about the earlier books, including Addison’s obsession with minutiae. I can only read about the characters traveling on this or that tram line so many times before my eyes start skipping lines to the things that really matter. This would bother me less if it didn’t feel like it came at the expense of more important things.
For one, at the close of the trilogy, we still know virtually nothing about Evru, arguably the most important person in Thara’s past. We know nothing about their relationship except how it ended, about why Thara was drawn to Evru or what he got out of the relationship. We know very little about Thara’s own past, and only here do we finally get even crumbs of detail about his training as a prelate, one of the other most important events of his life. Yet we get the full name of every paper boy Thara encounters.
Furthermore, Addison makes plot decisions which are frankly baffling in their logic. To any reader with eyes, Iana was set up as Thara’s love interest, the most likely future candidate for his “moving on from Evru’s tragedy” romance. Three and a half books lead us to believe this.Then we get a bait-and-switch where Iana abruptly declares himself heterosexual and aromantic, and some rando we only get introduced to properly in the final third of the book is shoehorned in as Thara’s new crush.
To be clear, I’m not mad that Iana and Thara didn’t end as a couple—I was never deeply invested in their romance and would have been just as happy for there to be no romance at all in this story—I’m just a loss to understand this switch. It makes Thara and Olgarezh feel painfully lacking in chemistry, as we’ve had a fraction of the time to get to know them together as we have with Iana. We know almost nothing about Olgarezh as we have only a third of a book to get to know him, and the nature of his role and his character keeps him buttoned up for most of it, so I found it hard to care about him.
It would have been far less annoying and unsatisfying to just have Thara end the book single, but looking forward to a future romance. Instead, what we get feels rushed and narratively nonsensical. It also makes the ending of the book feel inorganic and unnecessary, a tool to force bonding between Thara and Olgarezh, rather than a rewarding conclusion to Thara’s adventures in Amalo.
The second thing that surprised me in an unsatisfying way was Thara ending the series essentially exiled from Amalo. A huge thread of this series has been Thara learning to accept love from others and find a way to set down roots again, and he was doing that in Amalo! He had friends, he had peers, he had connections, he had a home! And yet at the end of the book, that’s all taken away, and he’s kicked onto a life on the road with Olgarezh, who he barely knows, and all of his Amalo connections are relegated to pen pals. It was shocking and very disappointing. Again—if Addison had never planned for Thara to stay in Amalo, why wasn’t there more groundwork laid for his being unsatisfied having to stay in one place, why so much time spent showing him settling in to Amalo? It felt like giving him a home only to once again take it away.
There was a Maia cameo, which I loved, and it was really fun to revisit the Untheliniese court from the perspective of someone other than Maia, and to see Maia from an outside perspective. It was fun to see Csevet from another angle too! Really loved getting to see Maia in action as Edrahasivar too.
On the whole, this was a disappointing end to the trilogy. I still love the first two books, and there is still much I like about this one, but Addison makes too many jarring narrative shifts that make no sense and don’t add up in the face of the earlier parts of the story for it to be satisfying.
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