Character sketch: 10/10
World creation: 7/10
Presentation: 8/10
Compelling: 7/10
Overall: 7.4/10
Opinion: Characters keep you moving. The story, meh!
Okay! Where do I start! The blade itself… The first of the trilogy by Joe Abercrombie.
I have to get his off my chest before I get to the positives, of which there are many. The story makes a lot of tall, dainty, mouthwatering promises, whereas the delivery is more like that on an election pledge. The story hooks you from page one only to leave you high and dry at the end. What, was that the ending I was so eagerly waiting for? Come on! At least incentivize me with a cliff hanger to start the next book! (Maybe because I’m partial towards story-driven books!)
Phew! Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to the juicy parts. Joe Abercrombie, the author of this fantastic book, has done an astounding job of making characters from a fantasy novel relatable, and as people whom we can root for. Characterization at its best. The descriptions, while not losing the author’s voice, makes you feel like you are in the scene yourself and would bite the sword any moment now. The only complaint here would be that the same description that made the journey through the book so enjoyable, makes it unbearably slow in the last few chapters (same problem as mentioned above).
While reading, the writing is so thoroughly engaging that only in hindsight did I realize that the story has meandered quite a bit and is riddled with multiple plot points, sub-plots, subtexts and unanswered questions. Hopefully, they would be answered in the subsequent books.
But at the end of the day, I’m invested so deeply in the characters that I will most certainly pick up the second book. At least to have a blast with the wonderfully delicious descriptions. This book would be the best example to put to rest the age-old argument. Is it the plot or the way you tell a story that matter? The way you tell a story. it is.
Storyline (Spoilers): Glokta, Jazel and Logen are all young men and that’s where the similarity ends, each having their motivation or the lack of one per se. A sequence of events brings them all together and they now have a mysterious journey ahead of them, led by a cranky old wizard Bayaz.
Yeah, that’s all the story is, strictly speaking!
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