I lucked onto Polk's Witchmark trilogy with the first one -- and yes, all three are amazing. I've re-read the trilogy several times, and it always *grabs* me: and while the romantic relationships are great, I'm also very interested in the complexities of the brother and sister relationship (and the ways in which the Powers That Be in that culture approach power). I've just grabbed Polk's The Midnight Bargain that's just out -- and I also liked Even Thought I knew the End.
Interlaced series which is what Lake's are (like Pratchett's) are difficult!
I started with Carry On in the "Mysterious Powers" sub-series which are mostly set in the 1920s--at that time, it was the first in that series. Since then Lake added Forged in Combat which is a prequel (set in the 1880s, focusing on characters who are the parents of the male protagonist in CO).
CO remains one of the ones I reread the most, so unless you are very focused on the chronological order of series novels, I would recommend CO over "Forged." I think CO is a better introduction to a lot of the most important themes of the series (the trauma of war, the religious-magical aspects of the world, the inability of the institutions to deal with the different realities of WWI, and the difficulties of healing, whether of humans or, as the series goes on, the Land/Albion).
Lake gives information in Afterwords after other books in the series that feature the same characters (and it might help to know quite a few of them are novellas, with a few collections of shorter pieces!--they're not all novels). And although many of the books can be read as stand-alone (Lake makes it clear which are, and are not), there are meta-narrative themes that I can see tie them all together -- and some characters appear across the series' boundaries.
Murderbot's VID! OMG, yes -- and how much that project brought together incidents from the past (espcially the ship full of people being delivered to be contract labor!) and studying the fictional media to work on getting the emotional content into the vid, and the whole collaborative process (I thought this vid was nicely foreshadowed by Me2.0 giving Three the file--am spacing out on the particulars of that one which is why I need to re-read the whole series). And it worked!
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branchandroot
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Date: 2023-11-16 05:04 am (UTC)Interlaced series which is what Lake's are (like Pratchett's) are difficult!
I started with Carry On in the "Mysterious Powers" sub-series which are mostly set in the 1920s--at that time, it was the first in that series. Since then Lake added Forged in Combat which is a prequel (set in the 1880s, focusing on characters who are the parents of the male protagonist in CO).
CO remains one of the ones I reread the most, so unless you are very focused on the chronological order of series novels, I would recommend CO over "Forged." I think CO is a better introduction to a lot of the most important themes of the series (the trauma of war, the religious-magical aspects of the world, the inability of the institutions to deal with the different realities of WWI, and the difficulties of healing, whether of humans or, as the series goes on, the Land/Albion).
Lake gives information in Afterwords after other books in the series that feature the same characters (and it might help to know quite a few of them are novellas, with a few collections of shorter pieces!--they're not all novels). And although many of the books can be read as stand-alone (Lake makes it clear which are, and are not), there are meta-narrative themes that I can see tie them all together -- and some characters appear across the series' boundaries.
Murderbot's VID! OMG, yes -- and how much that project brought together incidents from the past (espcially the ship full of people being delivered to be contract labor!) and studying the fictional media to work on getting the emotional content into the vid, and the whole collaborative process (I thought this vid was nicely foreshadowed by Me2.0 giving Three the file--am spacing out on the particulars of that one which is why I need to re-read the whole series). And it worked!