Review: Another Solid Powder Mage Short
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 09 25, 2013
Hope's End, like The Girl of Hrusch Avenue, is a short story set in the same world as Promise of Blood and taking place before the events of that novel.  Also like The Girl of Hrusch Avenue, Hope's End features a female hero (McClellan obviously noticed one particular criticism of Promise of Blood).  It's written to be accessible to a reader who hasn't read Promise of Blood, but they probably won't appreciate it nearly as much.  Tamas plays a prominent role (again, like The Girl of Hrusch Avenue), and we get perhaps our best window yet into Tamas' motivations for his actions at the beginning of Promise of Blood.Hope's End has a lot going for it.  It has a great backdrop: the first wave charging into a breach in an era when muskets made that a suicide mission.  The setup is careful, the conflict has clear consequences, and the action sequence is to McClellan's usual high standards.  Unfortunately, I found the end a little too pat for a short story, which needs to be high on its impact to word count ratio.