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About the time I finished reading Dreamhearth, I happened on a giveaway for a couple of Hogarth’s other books, and got them. It turned out that they’re very late on in things, and there is a warning up front about other books to read first. I spent a couple days deciding if I was going to leap into things here, and eventually did.

I was a bit surprised to find Jahir and Vasiht’h here, and in much changed circumstances. I figure Dreamstorm would help explain a lot of that, but….

In fact, it’s obvious the galaxy in general has been a fairly busy place over the last several years. It takes some digging to find out that it’s been about a dozen years since the last I’ve seen the duo, and while Jahir is fairly important, there’s plenty of other characters that are more central to the plot, including some obviously returning villains.

So, I had a fair amount of figuring out to do, and I certainly don’t recommend starting here. Hogarth recommends Healer’s Wedding as the start point in the note at the beginning of the book, though that one mentions it’s bringing together characters from Her Instruments and Princes’ Game as well as the Dreamhealers series, so getting into everything could be quite an undertaking, and cutting the Gordian Knot here might not be an entirely bad answer (…though I think I’d probably still recommend cutting it a bit earlier than this).

At any rate, here is where I did start, and things did largely make sense, though with a lot of backfill to be done, and in many cases only a sketchy idea of the large cast of characters. So if you want to start here as I did, go ahead, it will work out.

Overall, the flow was good, and I picked up momentum after a rocky start to a nicely dramatic ending. I’ve gotten very used to trilogies over the decades, and it is very nice to see Hogarth do duologies that split very well, with a very natural stopping point for the first book.