Reviews tagging 'Death of parent'

Traitor's Blade by Sebastien de Castell

2 reviews

book_and_dog's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional funny fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

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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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