Trilogy Tour #6 – Acacia #3

Acacia’s sins have finally come home to roost as the Auldek, who for generations purchased quota children (child slaves) from Acacia in exchange for the addictive drug mist, are on the verge of invading the Known World. In their way stand the four Akaran siblings. Yes, four, as Aliver, who perished at the end of the first book, has been brought back to life by Corinn’s sorcery. But Aliver’s return from the dead has not softened Corinn; rather, her manipulations and schemes grow to new bounds.  Meanwhile, Mena heads to the frozen north to stall the Auldek advance, while Dariel remains in the Auldek homeland to meet with the leaders of the left-behind and now free quota children.

The beginning of The Sacred Band offers an incredible amount of tension, as the massive Auldek army slowly moves its way to the Known World.  However, although the  main storyline of the trilogy is wrapped up, there are too many threads left hanging, leaving a not-entirely satisfying ending. Other than the Akaran siblings, none of the other many point of view characters have their stories resolved in any way. This is especially frustrating given the amount of space devoted to these characters, which could have ultimately been better used to move the plot farther along. In the same vein, there were many scenes that ultimately had no bearing on the plot.For example, in one chapter, Dariel wanders into an abandoned city, gets attacked by a huge flying bat, and rescues two small dogs. Other than this chapter, the dogs never again play a role in the story, except for a random mention here and there. In another chapter, one of the side characters is attacked by assassins sent by a rival tribal chief. The attackers are quickly dispatched, but the tribal chief is never heard from again and there are no repercussions to the attack, other than to give something for the character to do. These scenes and others unnecessarily bloat the novel, at the expense of the story, which progresses so slowly that by the time I reached the last few chapters and nothing had been resolved, I immediately figured out the ending, which completely deflated almost two books’ worth of build-up.

Despite these shortcomings, The Sacred Band and the Acacia trilogy as a whole hold up well against anything else in the genre. Durham created an intensely rich and fully-formed world inhabited by complex characters that the reader can simultaneously root for and despise. His villains in all three novels are especially well-formed, and inspire at least some sympathy for their goals, except for the League of Vessels, which is purely in the “evil” column (but interesting nonetheless). By the end, I was not yet ready to leave the world of Acacia and wished there had been either a longer epilogue or perhaps a follow-on novella.