This was a better book than the last one, though that's not a hard thing to do. Tong Lashing managed to at least be interesting enough to make me want to finish it, though not enough that I couldn't have put the book down and walked away. I liked the poke at roleplaying in the beginning (and Thomas Covenant, who deserves it...) even if the actual game just made me think of Yugioh. If in the last book I kept wondering if I was missing the joke, this book I didn't see any jokes to miss. For a book proposing to parody fantasy, it was just depressing, self-centred and predictable. Part of this is because Apropos gets more and more unlikable over time. The other is because he occasionally has to act really out of character to get the plot moving and there seemed to be a lot of moments like that in this book.

I was kinda annoyed by the Oriental theme of the book. I wouldn't have minded the blending of Japanese and Chinese culture so much if the book was parodying the whole genre, but instead it came across as the kind of sloppy world building by stealing from history that I find so annoying in fantasy. I suppose since I'm very familar with that type of genre too, the story was even more predictable than usual.

It did make me laugh once, and grin at least one other time (for comparison an average Discworld novel makes me laugh out loud about 2-3 times and grin every couple of pages... this is why I consider Pratchett to be a god of humour), but I'm not really sure what these book's purposes are any more. I read them for the humour, but they've lost that element. If there is another book, I doubt I'll read it. ( )

Hysterical ( )

Like the other books in this trilogy, this one was humorous, but I would have liked a different main character. This one did bother me specifically a bit though, because the whole Asian parody crossed the borders, I thought, into racism. "Kit-chin" -come on! ( )

A disappointing end to the Apropos saga. It's almost like Peter David forgot during The Woad to Wuin that he wants us to hate Apropos, and so he makes up for it here. The novel simply left a bad taste in my mouth. The story was still fairly good and interesting, but everything that I hoped for in this book was intentionally thrown away and destroyed. ( )