Bringer of Dust by J. M. Miro

Book Review

T Nagarajan

Bringer of Dust is the second installment of J. M. Miro’s The Talents trilogy and picks up shortly after the ending of Ordinary Monsters, both in terms of story, as well as the same broody atmosphere.  It is just as well that I had only just finished the first book and went straight onto the second – this is a complex tale, and you won’t be able to read this as a stand-alone book.  Miro’s world is dangerous – there is no safe place for our heroes and every page turned brings with it a sense of foreboding as to what will happen next.  Miro really toys with your emotions, so that you can never really trust nor predict what will happen next.

It is hard to talk about the second book without comparing it to the first.  Where the first book did very well in building together multiple characters’ accounts cohesively, book two does not do this quite as well.  In Ordinary Monsters I was very impressed by how Miro did this without losing any of the pace of the narrative – the fragments of story were just long enough so that I remembered what was going on with each character without splintering the continuity of the story.  In Bringer of Dust, however, I think each story arc is a little too long, so that it took me a couple of pages to recall what was happening to each character when their story re-started.  However, each individual account kept at a relentless pace to really draw me in every time.  One thing Miro did very well in both books was their use of dramatic irony – there were plenty of little moments where I kept thinking “if only…”

Bringer of Dust is very much a book of two halves.  The first half is set predominantly in the seedy underbelly of London and uses this backdrop to introduce some delectable antiheroes and villains.  The second half continues what I expect is the main narrative of the trilogy by bringing together several of our protagonists’ stories thus far.  I was a bit unclear where the story was going in the first book.  This one resolves many questions that I had left over – predominantly about the motives for some of the main characters.  The protagonist and villain roles were more clearly defined (it helped that I had read the first book).  It did, however, mean that the narrative resolved into a more typical ‘ancient evil is about to awaken’ theme that we have seen in so many fantasy series so far.  This left me a little disappointed since the first book felt so original.

I did feel that there was a little disconnect from the first book.  A massive part of the story seemed to spring from absolutely nowhere – to the extent where I wondered whether Miro originally intended the first to be a stand-alone book.  The journey of some of the main characters seemed to shift their portrayal into a complete U-turn and this detracted a little from the depth built up in the trilogy so far.  The end of the book, however, does signpost toward the third, which I will definitely read (though I will need a lighter book in the meantime).  I like Miro’s style of writing in these books and the narrative keeps you guessing…