Shrine of Stars: Confluence Book 3

The final book wraps things up in a moebius strip of a story and the characters suffer a little from being moved around to suit this, but the ideas and images, the huge scale of what is described in the decaying remnants of a civilisation that rearranged galaxies for fun, is a delight. A good read.

Everything's all right

Joking, the only reason to ever mark this book down is because it ends!.Good delivery time on the book and loved every moment of it, a read to recommend to everyone!

Sadly, highly derivative and lacking new insights. Some good McAuley literary jokes, but he had already written better books when this was originally published. Strictly for completists.

It's hard to describe this book and the other two in the series. They were a combination of Lord of the rings, the New Testament story of Jesus,and 1001 Arabian nights. The author must have an imagination as wide as the sky to have created this series. It is a story of 1000 stories. Well maybe not 1000 but certainly a lot.One after another the stories unfold so that if you find one a little boring it soon and new one begins. Is the age old tale of the boy who saves the world. Seriously I cannot imagine how the author came up with so many ideas, such a vividly imagined kaleidoscope of a world and hundreds of different bloodlines/people. I don't write a lot of reviews. I read the first in the series which to me reads like one long book. Often the series will have a different feel from book to book as the author maturity.to me this felt like a unified work ended up reading all three one after the other, something I normally would not do. The series of books is highly recommended and I intend to read everything Mr. McAuley has written.

Dragged on too long and became a bit of a slog to get through. Child of the river is the only book in the trilogy worth reading.

The third book in McAuley's series is very different from the first two, especially in the last 100 pages. The author actually changes the subject pretty much, and because of this the book feels quite unpolished, like two stories mixed into one. The whole saga is not rounded to the reader's complete satisfaction, but it is interesting nevertheless. The first part deals with Yama's imprisonment with the heretics and it gets 2-3 stars from me. It's a little bit too gory and bloody, like a B-movie. I agree with the reviewers who have remarked that the bad guys don't stay dead at all and keep showing themselves, it gets irritating after a while. Another aspect which bothered me were the overdetailed descriptions. It seemed like the author had a painting in front of him, with every little thing precisely shown, and wanted to accomplish the same descriptive level. But it was a little tiresome and boring. Also, since we now know that the 10000 bloodlines come from Earth's animals, it would be nice if they were identifiable... I suspect the author tried to do this -- Tamora was a fox? Pandaras a rodent? -- but it seems he didn't succeed. That being said, we get to the finale, which in my opinion it was beautiful. (Note: I haven't read the Heinlein story referred to by one of he reviewers, so perhaps I was more inclined to feel that the concepts are original and intriguing.) True, a lot of information and concepts are crammed in, the pace changes, the ending is not quite what the reader expected... but this is acceptable in my opinion. It's even better that the story does not end in a classical way and that the hero doesn't quite find what he was looking for. I was also suspecting from the beggining that we wouldn't find out more about the Preservers and that not all questions will be answered. I liked the cyclicity of everything, with every end representing a beginning. What I didn't like was the character development throughout the entire series. The bad guys are one sided, and the good guys don't seem to evolve at all. Even Yama, all his revelations are external, he stays linear. You don't quite catch his depth. There are influences not only from Gene Wolfe -- although I think any book that deals with characters in an artificial environment which have devolved from the knowledge on their forefathers will invariably be compared to his works -- but also from David Brin's uplift saga, the concept of species "raised" to sentience. For all its shortcomings, the book was quite captivating and interesting.

Enjoyable.

There is something to be said about "surprising" plot twists, but they are usually more interesting when they seem to have any connection to the rest of the story. Trying not to spoil what the "twist" is, I'll only say that in case it looks like an excuse to try and repeat a Heinlein short story concept, mainly because the conclusion seems tacked on and not integral to the story at all.What I'm trying to illustrate is that the individual elements aren't bad, but the whole is not blended together in a powerful or moving way, which is disappointing for a book with a theme of self-discovery. It just reads, to me, like a story that happened, not a story that drew me in and made me feel like I was living it, or that I'd ever ever want to read again.I'm surprised that the series gets such a strong rating.EDIT: Someone compared this series to the writings of Gene Wolf. Since I'd heard other good things about that author before, and was interested on seeing why they made the comparison, I read his "Book of the New Sun" series. Let me just say that how strong the New Sun series is just further points out how this series is lacking. What I criticize in in this series are the strengths (among others) of what Gene Wolf has written. That said, the similarities give me hope for Paul McAuley's future work.