"How did you know that would work?"
Stone glanced at him. "You mean telling the truth?"
Moon nodded. Stone just looked at him. "What?" Moon demanded.
Stone sighed and slung an arm around Moon's shoulders. "Nothing." (p.19)
Now that I've finished The Harbors of the Sun, I have officially finished reading the Books of the Raksura. Since this is the last book in a series, my thoughts may end up being a bit of a retrospective on the series as a whole.
The Edge of Worlds and The Harbors of the Sun make up kind of a Raksura duology, and as such, they're two parts of one longer overarching story. The first three Raksura books could be considered almost as a trilogy, but with more self-contained plots. You could in theory read the first three books out of order and still make sense of them. The Harbors of the Sun would not make sense without The Edge of Worlds. All of the same characters are here, and most of them aren't re-introduced in great detail for your convenience. Which is fine, I just wouldn't want to read these books too far apart from each other.
Also, for some reason Edge of Worlds and Harbors of the Sun don't have character lists at the back of the book! I'm pretty sure all five of the other Raksura books have these, so I was surprised that they're lacking here, especially when these two books might have the largest cast of characters compared to any of the other books. Maybe it was some weird publisher decision, I don't know.
The Harbors of the Sun picks up right where The Edge of Worlds leaves off, with two characters being held captive by the Hians and the rest of the cast trying to retrieve them as well as the dangerous ancient artifact that the Hians stole. Like The Edge of Worlds, there are quite a few different POV characters. Moon probably still gets the most POV-time but Bramble gets a fair bit too, and we also get chapters from Heart, Jade, Ember, and a very cute interlude from Frost (which was a highlight for me). There are more moving parts to the plot then there were in the early books, so I think this decision makes sense. Near the end, there were a couple of times when I felt like including certain characters' current perspectives decreased the narrative tension slightly, but it wasn't a huge deal.
Compared to the previous book, which was the first half of this story after all, this one feels like it has a bit more of an emotional arc to it. Jade and Moon are still reckoning with reconciling their roles in the court with what happens when there are massive threats to the Reaches. There's also more to do with the Fell, the half-Fell flight we met in The Edge of Worlds, and various groundling civilizations. I think this book has more interaction with different groundling groups than any of the previous ones, which is interesting.
I think my favorite parts of this book were the character interactions and the half-Fell flight. Pearl and Malachite were a possibly-unexpected but totally badass duo, Frost's chapter where she interacts with Ember and Pearl was adorable, and Kethel getting lowkey annoyed about everyone threatening to kill it all the time amused me quite a bit. Consolation was fascinatingly strange and I was very glad that Malachite saw potential in her. Also, Bramble was a fun POV character because she was straightforward and practical and just felt like someone I'd like in real life. Just an ordinary Arbora determined to do her best in the tough situation she's in.
As for what I didn't like as much, I had a bit more trouble visualizing the Creepy Ancient Ruins in this book compared to ruins in previous installments, and the falling action (?) felt really really long. Every time I thought things were about to wrap up and the characters were going to go home, the story kept going. This wasn't bad, per se, but I think it's possible that the end of the book could have been tightened up slightly. Still, it resulted in an open ending without any particularly loose ends, and this is the end of the series, so maybe Martha Wells just wanted to spend enough time on the ending to get all that the way she wanted it.
Also, I struggled a bit with the character names, which has been a recurring theme for me in this series. It's not a huge problem, and it's probably a me thing, but for instance, there were multiple times when I was reading a scene and got Shade mixed up with Stone, because I read fast and their names begin and end with the same letters. Sometimes I had to go back and mentally recontextualize conversations as a result. Briar doesn't have a big role in this book, but in previous books having Briar and Bramble both be part of the supporting cast could be a little challenging to keep straight. Sometimes Martha Wells' supporting characters fall into the category of, "probably very distinct to the author, but a little hard to tell apart as a reader." There are lots of characters that do stand out, but many of the warriors and hunters sort of blend together. Murderbot arguably also has this problem with its supporting cast at times. But if you reread Murderbot as often as I've been doing, that becomes way less of an issue.
This is a series-ender, as previously mentioned so let's talk about how it ends. I mean, I think it ends the series pretty well. I think you could potentially stop after The Siren Depths, if you wanted to, but if you don't want to, then here are The Edge of Worlds and The Harbors of the Sun. I think The Siren Depths and The Harbors of the Sun both have good endings. The Siren Depths' ending is a little more about Moon coming to terms with his place in Indigo Cloud and the fact that he is valued and cared for, whereas The Harbors of the Sun ends more on Jade and Moon learning that they can come back together after facing really difficult decisions when there were much bigger things than themselves at risk. So I like them both, in different ways.
If I had to choose a least favorite installment of the Raksura series, I would probably go with the Stories of the Raksura volumes. This is not because they are bad. I just don't particularly care for short stories and anthologies in general, so these were never going to be my favorites. That being said, there are a few stories from the Stories of the Raksura that I really like ("The Tale of Indigo and Cloud" and "The Dark Earth Below" come to mind), so I think both volumes are worth reading at least once. Not sure that I'll purchase them physically, though.
Overall, I've really enjoyed Moon's journey throughout the series and it's also been really fun to see what kinds of strange new settings Martha Wells can come up with. This is definitely a series I would recommend for someone looking to investigate her fantasy back catalogue, or to anyone who's interested in an inventive secondary world with absolutely no humans. Moon is a prickly but lovable main character and the interesting structure and politics of Raksuran courts is like catnip to me, a known political intrigue enjoyer.
