Locus Magazine: With Elizabeth Bear’s previous novels in the same world: the Eternal Sky trilogy of Range of Ghosts, Shattered Pillars, and Steles of the Sky. That trilogy is one of the best – most deeply thought, carefully structured, and elegantly finished – epic fantasies of the last decades.
Bear’s worldbuilding is, as ever, a richly detailed delight, rendered tangible in cut-glass prose. The precision and care with which she employs language make the landscapes through which her characters move come powerfully to life – and gives those characters, too, powerful presence and compelling life.
It’s an enormously rich and textured novel, magnificently compelling – and really easy to read. Despite its sprawling, epic canvas, its pace is tight, and Bear cuts between plotlines with an adroit eye for tension. The Stone in the Skull is an astonishing delight of a book.