Fantasy Review: Darkglass Mountain series

This series first came across my desk in a used bookstore's annual clearance sale. I spent $3 for this whole series - or at least, what I believed to be the whole series. 

While the first book, The Serpent Bride, reads pretty well as a stand-alone, by the second book it's clear that many of these characters are repeat characters. Much of the backstory is vague in a way that makes the reader feel they're expected to know it - as if there was a prequel as well as a whole separate same-world series preceding them. The second book, Twisted Citadel, is where this story gets a little too Game-of-Thrones-y for my taste. Structurally, every couple chapters we hop across the world to another location. Within that scene we're in any number of character's POVs. At any given moment there are a ton of things happening and competing priorities across dozens of characters. I did appreciate that each set of side characters could, for a hundred pages or so, become almost as important as the main characters, with fully fleshed out goals, pasts, and desires. 

By the end of the series, I was again feeling another aspect of GoT - the lack of a cohesive narrative arc. Throughout this series there are so many side plots and side characters that are introduced, carried along for a few hundred pages, and then disposed of. I had to finish the series to know whether some of them mattered at all.  And in the end, I think a lot of them didn't. It was a little disappointing, only because wanting to see how the loose ends tied up was what kept me reading all 1,500 pages of this series.  One last criticism to mention - while this series was published in the early 90s and 00s, I had hoped that the female author would have meant that female characters would be treated fairly. Instead, I saw a lot of character building through rape and forced motherhood (Ishbel, Salome, and Inardle), and what in the world happened to Herewald? 

What I enjoyed about this series was the way that Douglass kept me guessing. There were so many plot twists that were unlike anything I've ever read before. If anything, this book was a lesson in creativity and an example of the freedom of the genre. At worst, it was a sprawling novel with too many loose threads - although who knows, maybe they tie in to later series. Unless these resurface at another used book store, I don't think I'll be reading any more.