Reviews with content warning for Violence - Traitor's Blade

Reviews tagging 'Violence'

Traitor's Blade by Sebastien de Castell

10 reviews

kylieqrada's review against another edition

adventurous emotional funny lighthearted mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

2024 reread: 4-4.5 ⭐️s. I completely forgot about this series and then I found out there’s a spin-off?? So we’re doing a reread. And I’m live laugh loving!

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abookishhart26's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional funny inspiring fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This was a fun, but pretty bleak read. Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the main character, did.

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kaydee_reads's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional funny mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Such a slow start, it was initially a struggle to get into… but then once they got to the main city where the majority of the plot takes place, it took off like a race horse and I was completely hooked. Loved the camaraderie and although the “mystery” was quite obvious, it’s written in a way that the reader is in on the joke - the main character can’t figure it out because he’s too busy being noble, but literally everyone else (including the reader) knows, and that was fun. I love overly-noble heroes who everyone else pokes fun at… but also can’t help but love and follow. Falcio is a great example of this. I’d give the first half of the book a 3, the second a 5, so splitting the difference and going with 4.

The only scene I hated was

the sex scene. Falcio is almost out of his mind after being tortured, and says no, stop, several times, and she keeps going, saying she isn’t afraid of him… that’s not how consent works, my dude. You’re clearly supposed to be intrigued by her, and find the scene healing/romantic, that she convinced him her sexual healing would… heal him? But it just feels coercive and sort of gross, especially when she tied him to the bed without consent, after the poor man had JUST been chained up and tortured for days! I hope, if she sticks around in future books, she gets more of a personality (and a conscience) than “sexy woman heals you with sex for your own good, regardless of how you feel about it”. The author clearly does know how to write good female characters, so she’s sort of a weird cliche anomaly.

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kjcm's review against another edition

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adventurous dark fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

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_mayoush_'s review against another edition

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adventurous dark funny fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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justineboots's review against another edition

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adventurous dark funny tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Okay! New favourite! I need to binge the rest of this series. This was just so much fun.

The main characters are well-formed and complex - the plot is intriguing and the questions the book raises are very meaningful.

I will say that the last 10-20% of the book kinda dropped the ball with one too many plot twists/plot revelations. Personally one of them could have been done without and made the story more… mysterious?

That being said I super enjoyed it. I’ll definitely be picking up the next books. I really want to see where the story takes us next.

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natcat's review against another edition

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adventurous funny medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

This book is something of an odd duck, but I did enjoy it. The comparisons to The Three Musketeers are apt, particularly in the fairly tongue-in-cheek tone of the writing and the decisions of the main character to solve all his problems with the maximum amount of drama possible (Falco isn’t a lot like d’Artagnan, but in this respect he is very similar!).

The flashbacks were a little confusing in that it wasn’t always clear when things were happening, but I did enjoy how they slowly unfolded the story of Falco and of the King and his Greatcoats. The secondary characters varied from too thinly characterized (oddly, Falco’s two companions/friends suffered most from this, I thought) to very entertaining (most of the less important secondary characters were actually very well-drawn in their brief page time).

I mostly enjoyed the series of adventures that Falco found himself in (aside from the slightly odd little interlude with Ethalia which didn't seem to have much of a point and raised far too many questions about consent for something that didn't go anywhere), but the last 10% or so of the book contained a lot of revelations that didn't really get a chance to settle, and felt weirdly paced in comparison to the rest of the book and very much like it was only interested in setting up the sequel, which I am definitely going to read!

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anniskw's review against another edition

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adventurous funny fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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sarah_ann_roth's review against another edition

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adventurous dark hopeful medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

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emilybennett's review against another edition

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adventurous dark funny mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Traitor's Blade follows a group of Greatcoats, people who enforced the King’s Law, after the King has been murdered by the Dukes, and who are now treated as traitors. Throughout this book they are attempting to fulfill the King’s last wishes of them, to find his Chariotes (whilst having no idea what his Chariotes actually are).

If you haven't read Sebastien De Castell's other series 'Spellslinger', you may want to skip ahead to -"However, this book is not character-driven,"-, not because there'll be spoilers, but because I'm going to be comparing the two quite a bit. Reading this book, I kept thinking of how similar it is to Spellslinger, not in the plot but in everything else, and just seemed to be more adult and dark. It had the same writing style and humour as Spellslinger, but I found that I didn't like it so much in this story, most likely because, as a teenager I am the intended audience for Spellslinger, so the humour is more aimed at people my age, whereas Traitor's Blade is an adult book, with more adult humour to match (it also probably has something to do with the lack of a Reichis-like character). I experienced a similar disconnect between the two as I didn't like the characters in Traitor's Blade as much as I liked those in Spellslinger. I think this is definitely due to the fact that I didn't feel I could really relate to them as much, which is an incredibly important aspect of my enjoyment of a book. Something that confused me about this however is the fact that I still related to characters in the other adult fantasies I have read, but those all included multiple POVs, of which I often preferred the younger characters', whereas Traitor's Blade has only one perspective, Falcio's, and he's an older, more pessimistic character, who I had a lot of difficulties connecting with.

However, this book is not character-driven, which means that the struggle to relate to the characters didn't overly impact my enjoyment. This book is very fast-paced, and so much happened, especially considering the fact that this book is less than 400 pages long. It was a very quick read and I felt like I was flying through, however it wasn't an easy read, because there were a lot of things going on in this book that were very upsetting and quite frankly just grim. I would definitely recommend checking out the content warnings for this, a list of which can be found here.

I did really enjoy this book, despite some of the above, and I'm looking forward to continuing with the series, although I have heard that some of the scenes in the next book are even worse than those in this. I would recommend this book to someone looking for a fast-paced fantasy, but would warn them to read the content warnings first and to be wary of the particular writing style.

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