This review contains spoilers for Dark Age.
I liked Dark Age more than Iron Gold. It was longer, but I read it faster. I am not entirely sure how that works, especially since Darrow spent what felt like the entire book on Mercury.
There were times when I was ready for him to get off the planet. It seemed like every time the book returned to Darrow, he was still trying to survive the same losing war. The situation with Orion and the Storm Gods also showed how little control he had over everything happening around him. He gave her a limit, she ignored it, and he had to kill one of his oldest allies before she destroyed even more of Mercury.
Even though that part of the story went on for a while, the book never felt as slow as Iron Gold. I think being five books into the series helped. I already knew the characters and had a clear picture of the world, so I did not have to spend as much time trying to understand what I was looking at.
The first four books had already built the setting in my head. In Dark Age, I could just watch everything happen.
Ephraim became my favorite character in this book. I thought he was interesting in Iron Gold, but he was still an antihero and kind of a screwup. I could see the potential for him to become a better person if he ever got himself together. In Dark Age, he finally did.
I liked watching him train the Skuggi and slowly earn Sefi’s trust. He also developed a real relationship with Pax instead of continuing to see him as a kid he had been hired to kidnap. By the end, he had become someone Pax could depend on.
His relationship with Ozgard was good too. Ozgard had an interesting backstory and felt like more than a strange shaman who occasionally said something mysterious. The scene where Ephraim accidentally ate one of his spirit berries because he thought it was a walnut was probably the funniest part of the book. He was completely out of his mind, holding a mop that he thought was a rifle, and still managed to throw himself into battle.
Ephraim also escaped with Pax and Electra, answered Lyria’s distress call, and helped finish the fight against the Red Hand after Lyria freed Victra and Volga. Then he went back to warn Sefi when he could have stayed away from the whole situation.
I hated seeing Fá kill him.
Ephraim had finally become the person I thought he could be in my last review. Then Fá survived the explosion, ripped out his heart, and ate it. I liked Ephraim more with each chapter, which made losing him at the end feel worse. He went from being one of the new characters I was unsure about to my favorite character in the book.
I am also curious about what happens with Valdir the Unshorn now that he is free. He was Sefi’s lover, but he also clearly has a lot of love and admiration for Darrow. With Sefi dead and Fá controlling the Obsidians, I do not know where that leaves him.
The Victra, Lyria, and Volga storyline worked better than I expected too. They are not three characters I would have thought to put together, but I liked watching them figure each other out while they were stranded on Mars.
Ulysses being nailed to a tree was brutal. I already hated Harmony, so I was fine with Victra and Lyria feeding her to the pitvipers. Part of me still thinks Victra should have just cut her in half with a razor, but either one works.
Lyria became more interesting to me during this part of the story because she finally started taking action. Now she also has Figment’s parasite in her head, and I still do not understand what it is capable of doing. Pax seems to know more about it than he is saying, so I am interested to see where that goes.
Mustang did not feel like the same person in this book. In the earlier books, she was this powerful, methodical, strategic planner who could find a way through problems that seemed impossible to solve. She was usually several moves ahead of everyone around her.
I did not get that same feeling from her in Dark Age. She seemed like someone who had been worn down by trying to hold the Republic together and was mostly reacting to everything happening around her. I understand that she is older and dealing with problems on a completely different scale now, but she still came across as a diminished version of the person she used to be.
Kavax gave me a similar feeling. He used to seem almost indestructible. He was someone the other characters could always depend on. Now he seems older and more frail, and you can see what the life he has lived has done to him.
Maybe that is part of the point. These are not the same young characters from the original trilogy. They have spent years at war, built a Republic, and watched it start to fall apart. They should not feel exactly the same anymore. I just miss some of the energy they used to have.
Lysander is the character I feel the most conflicted about. I still find myself rooting for him to become a good person.
He reminds me of Cassius in the earlier books. Cassius spent a long time fighting against Darrow, but I always wanted him to figure things out and come back around. Lysander gives me the same feeling. He is young and still trying to become the person his family and the Society told him he was supposed to be. I am not sure that person is who he actually is.
Kalindora telling him that his mother was a reformer gives him a reason to question what he believes about his family. At the same time, shooting Alexandar felt like a decision he cannot take back. Even if Lysander eventually changes sides, I do not know how Darrow or anyone from the Rising could forgive him for that.
Then again, Darrow killed Cassius’s brother, and those two still managed to become boys again. You can come back from anything, baby.
Speaking of Cassius, I called it.
In my Iron Gold review, I wrote that I was not completely convinced he was dead. Lysander never saw his body and was simply told what happened, which felt intentionally unresolved.
Nearly 800 pages later, Cassius finally showed up to rescue Darrow. I knew it.
The Abomination reveal did not work as well for me. It reminded me of what happened with Colonel Quaritch in James Cameron’s Avatar movies. Neytiri kills Quaritch at the end of the first Avatar. Then Avatar: The Way of Water brings him back as a Na’vi Recombinant with the original Quaritch’s memories.
That is basically how I felt about the Jackal returning as a clone. The original villain was dead, but instead of moving on to someone new, the story brought back another version of the same person.
I liked the Jackal as a villain in the original trilogy, but his story already had an ending. Bringing him back as a child clone felt unnecessary. The world is big enough to introduce a new villain without recreating the old one.
Overall, I would give Dark Age five out of five. It is probably toward the higher end of the series for me. It was long, and I could have spent less time on Mercury, but I enjoyed reading it and immediately wanted to start Light Bringer when I finished.
That is usually the best sign that a book worked for me.