Earth Logic (Elemental Logic #2) (Tor Books, 2005)
Water Logic (Elemental Logic #3) (Small Beer Press, 2007)
Air Logic (Elemental Logic #4) (Small Beer Press, 2019)
After falling deeply in love with Laurie J. Marks’s Fire Logic (which I reviewed last October), I dragged my feet on the rest of the series for fear of disappointment. But after discovering that the books were available from my local library via Hoopla, I decided to give them a go.
Earth Logic
★★★☆☆
If there was a problem with Fire Logic, it was the narrative that a colonized country should be expected to embrace its colonizers. Earth Logic reckons with that narrative and asks how to forge peace with a violent colonizer without resorting to the same tactics they used. The plot isn’t as gripping as the first book, since part of the answer is “decisive inaction,” and I didn’t fully believe some characters’ decision to kill [redacted] based on a reading of the glyph cards, which hadn’t been so blindly followed in the first book (IIRC). However, I enjoyed the introduction of two wonderfully complex new characters, Garland and Clement.
Water Logic
★★★★☆
The plot begins to pick up again: we learn of a rogue air witch out to assassinate Karis, and some time travel shenanigans occur. These hooks kept me intrigued while characters in the present day confronted issues of ethics and philosophy as well as the hard work of nation-building. I was SHOOK when [redacted] and [redacted] died, paving the way for a very compelling (and brutal) journey for Clement. And I loved how the time travel storyline exposed the complexities of past Shaftal—Zanja’s meeting with [redacted] gave me life!—and how those complexities tied into the larger reveal the characters come into at the end.
Air Logic
★★★★★
Unputdownable! The plot is GRIPPING, with an insidious villain and a couple turns that made me gasp in shock. I loved seeing the neurodiversity of the air children and how their inflexibility meant they had to systematize their ethics. Zanja, meanwhile, is gripped with grief and madness—and loses her most precious support system at the same time. (Her ending, and how the aforementioned time travel figures into it, is marvelous.) All the characters felt so real, including Tashar and Maxew, two disaffected young men who descend into extremism. A stunning conclusion to the series that gave me all the resolution I wanted.