[Madness]

Anyone sharing the love?

The Grand Design might be one of my favorite fantasy books ever - the first book in the series is also fantastic, though it all suffers in the third volume.

[Royce]

A friend of mine threw the Jackal of Nar at me a couple of years ago......but he missed. Should I have caught it? Is it that good?

[Madness]

Yeah, it's real good. Jackel of Nar is the first, The Grand Design is the second, and The Saints of the Sword the third.

The originality (well, some tropes still play out) of the mashup genres in the trilogy are most excellent.

Jackel of Nar strikes a unique tone directly at the beginning, TGD literally blows the series into "this could be amazing, did that just happen," and then I think Marco choked on the finale... and his writing, in my opinion, (while possibly commercially better now) has gotten progressively worse. It's like he went from an aspiring Bakker to Gemmell, no offense to Gemmell as I grew up reading a lot of his stuff and loving it. Legend might have been one of the first books to have me crying like a baby.

[Cüréthañ]

Agree completely.
I believe Marco started trying to write YA fantasy after T&K, but that third volume lost me pretty hard.  Did not check out his follow ups.

[Madness]

Yeah.

Lol - like if Bakker had just decided to tank the series at TJE and became commercially successful writing what people wanted.

[Kellais]

Lol - like if Bakker had just decided to tank the series at TJE and became commercially successful writing what people wanted.

HEY! Don't jinx it 
But to be honest, we just can't know...maybe he will...diminish as an author...who knows (not to forget that this is a matter of taste anyway). But i certainly don't hope so. Just as a sidenote, though: after reading TJE i had a feeling of "Man, somehow he was better in PoN". Am i the only one?!
Not sure if i still hold up that opinion after TWLW, but still...

More on topic: i liked the books...and iirc, all of them. So not sure what was so bad about the 3rd one?

[Wilshire]

But to be honest, we just can't know...maybe he will...diminish as an author...who knows (not to forget that this is a matter of taste anyway). But i certainly don't hope so. Just as a sidenote, though: after reading TJE i had a feeling of "Man, somehow he was better in PoN". Am i the only one?!
Not sure if i still hold up that opinion after TWLW, but still...

I can see why some people might think that way. TJE did not have the same depth of the ones previous. Still though I thought it was a good book, and WLW was on par with PoN imo. Can't please everyone. I think a major complaint of the series is related to the depth of PoN. There is a lot in there that slows down the series and makes it feel heavy handed. *shrug*. Both good.