Zan's Reviews > Mountain of Black Glass

3.5

At this point, you know what you're in for - Tad's sprawling virtual world story continues apace - a vast array of characters, scenes, all in impressive scenarios. His imagination is still on fine display here as we travel to some of the most fun Otherland worlds yet. But again, the plot progresses at a snail's pace - we flit between such a large cast that important characters end up with 2 or 3 chapters across the entire thousand page novel. It's so large and dense it just feels like it's hard for any type of consistent momentum to carry through.

That does fall away a bit once we finally get to the promised Siege of Ilium, and knowing much of anything about that story makes things particularly worrying for our characters... It's hard to really *love* them, but I was still holding on tightly. Things ramping up make this easily the most exciting ending and thus book in the series to date - but it still is dependent at its core of the rambling sprawl, that if it's not something you're enjoying this entry is definitely not going to change your mind.