A classic case of a brilliant writer whose talent is subverted and suppressed by his religious views/worldview. The first half of this is a gripping, fast-paced tale that superbly melds a character study of a lifelong warrior forced to finally grapple with her failures and inner demons, with a high-fantasy, multi-character epic of a world falling apart. This SHOULD have been a fantastic book.
Instead, the extreme nihilism and obsession with that had seeped into Stavey’s other books ends up absolutely taking over the second half.
The doctrine of emptiness is called shunyata in Buddhism and has a multitude of other names in other Eastern religions and philosophies, but the basic idea is that the deepest reality and the truest state of being is one of total emptiness in which you lose the self. This, paired with extreme nihilism, becomes a huge theme of the second half of the book, but one of the series’ weaknesses is that Stavely is never able to clearly articulate what it looks like to achieve emptiness and whether there is any moral good to achieving it.
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Coffee and Irony 