With the massive popularity of her novels, it is easy to forget that Jemisin was publishing short stories for a number of years before The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was in a glimmer in the reading public's eye. As beautiful as the writing is, and as enjoyable as the reading experience was, The Red-Stained Wings was more a chapter in a larger novel than a truly complete entry in its own right. The Gage is mostly absent from this novel, though serves to introduce a character likely to be a major player in the forthcoming third volume. The Dead Man is as richly drawn as any character can be, and his life and romance inside the besieged palace is some of the best writing Bear has done (which is saying something). The real story and the glory of the novel lies in its characterization. The story of The Red-Stained Wings is a simmering rage waiting to explode, but the explosion doesn't much happen here. It's very good, of course, and beautifully written as we've come to expect from Elizabeth Bear - but it's a siege novel. Not to lean too heavily on this old statement, but The Red-Stained Wings comes across as more of a middle volume than anything Bear has written before. The Red-Stained Wings is the second volume in Elizabeth Bear's Lotus Kingdoms trilogy, a different part of the same world as her acclaimed Eternal Sky sequence.
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