\nAs is standard in the fantasy genre, The Blade Itself<\/i> is the first part of a trilogy.\n<\/p>\n
\nBut the book deviates from the standard path on page 10, where we find out that one of the main characters we will be following is a crippled torturer. We also have a disillusioned barbarian warrior, an ex-slave bent on vengeance, a spoiled young nobleman, a waspish young woman, and other unappealing characters. This is quite refreshing when compared to the usual fare, but it was hard to care about these people. The ones with the harsh backgrounds at least had some backbone – the spoiled nobleman was just tedious. And after the first few chapters, once you get over the novelty value, the characters became surprisingly bland and predictable.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe world that these people inhabit is not a nice place, either. There is impending war, and corruption, slavery, vengeance and a justice system based on inquisition and torture. The whole book is quite macabre and dark – even brutal in places. There are no elves or unicorns, and not much of anything to cheer about. Fantasy noir.\n<\/p>\n
\nWell, a story about despicable characters in a harsh world can be interesting, too, if they do interesting things. But in this book they didn’t do much at all. There were no major events, no turning points, no resolutions. The characters also don’t mesh, they don’t connect with each other in other than peripheral ways.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe book was mostly full of scene-setting and world-building: introducing the characters one by one, and getting them all to the places where they will, presumably, start doing more interesting things in the next book. I found this rather unsatisfactory. The result felt unfinished, like an overgrown prologue published as a book. Its only raison d’être<\/i> is to make you buy the next book.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe writing is decent but somewhat uneven. Some parts are strikingly well imagined and told. The dialogue is generally snappy and has just the right amount of humour, and the characters’ thoughts are refreshingly realistic. And people actually go to the loo occasionally, and wizards – when interrupted in their bath – storm into the room and start throwing spells around while they’re stark naked. The weakest part of the writing is that each character tends to have a phrase that they like to repeat a lot, or a thought they keep coming back to all the time. Some of this repetition got quite annoying after a while.\n<\/p>\n
\nOn the plus side the book definitely stood out from the crowd. The characters are very distinct and realistic, and quite memorable. But that’s not enough. While this wasn’t a bad book. I definitely cannot agree with the glowing reviews. (Numerous reviewers have described The Blade Itself<\/i> as the best debut of the year, or even the best fantasy book of the year. Must have been a poor year.)\n<\/p>\n
\nAmazon US<\/a>, Amazon UK<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As is standard in the fantasy genre, The Blade Itself is the first part of a trilogy. But the book deviates from the standard path on page 10, where we find out that one of the main characters we will be following is a crippled torturer. We also have a disillusioned barbarian warrior, an ex-slave […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}