Quick Review: The Alchemist in the Shadows
Like The Cardinal’s Blades, The Alchemist in the Shadows is still a swashbuckling adventure set in an alternate history, with little room for depth or thought-provoking moments, and featuring stereotypical characters, the main ones being certain to make it through pretty much anything thanks to their great fighting skills and even greater luck. And Ballardieu is relegated to a background role and not as much of an annoyance anymore. On the other hand, the fantasy elements are somewhat more notable this time around, but the actual historical setting and characters are emphasized even more and described in greater detail. Yet it remains a pretty light read that you can just get through, without requiring much focus and definitely without any reason for concern regarding the outcome of any situation.
Then again, those descriptions of historical events and characters are usually rather dry information dumps that do require more attention in order to fully grasp, yet they’re not that relevant to the story and can give the impression that the author is largely showing off, so glazing over them will speed up reading without much risk of missing anything important. But what may slow reading is that, while the scenes still succeed rapidly, the previous book’s short chapters are replaced with a fixed structure where each part has four chapters, the last one being very short but the second being particularly long, and the other two also being longer than those from The Cardinal’s Blades.
Rating: 3/5
