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A review by crybabybea
The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
This was so unbelievably boring. I pushed through because it's been recommended so many times by people whose reading tastes usually perfectly match mine, and it's also been personally recommended to me by people I trust. Everyone swears that it pays off by the end but I just left feeling meh. I hope that it pays off in reading the rest of the series but after my experience with this book I have very little desire to continue the series, at least for right now.
I love a character driven story, and I love when fantasies really take their time with the world to allow the reader to explore and really feel immersed. I think the problem I had here was that all the build-up felt unnecessary.
The world itself is not complicated enough that we really need to dig into the details of political machinations, nor are the characters unique enough that we need to spend 80% of the book in the mundanity of their lives to really get a feel for what motivates them/what their challenges are. Yes, they were good characters, for the most part, I love unlikeable characters, but you have a good foundation for their characterizations pretty quickly. The world is just like every other medieval fantasy, and though I see the subversions taking root, I can't say my reading experience was bettered by spending the majority of the book in war rooms discussing the action happening off-page.
The way women were portrayed in this book was also ick, despite there being a huge lack of female characters at all. Sometimes I even felt like women didn't even exist in this world except Ardee, who basically served to be a motivation for one of our POV characters, and a plot device for the character arc of one of the secondary main characters. I hope her story gets a little more attention in the following books. Ferro, our only female POV character, has such an interesting (though not necessarily unique) characterization that makes her POV one of the standouts for me. The chapter that introduces her was my favorite out of all, I think.
And it kinda bugs me because Abercrombie is clearly a talented writer. He has a great ability for "show don't tell", as well as a dark, witty humor that really settles itself well in the world he's created. I don't really understand why he chose to write this book the way he did, so that the first book is almost like a prequel introducing the characters and world, rather than a fully-fledged first book with its own plot.
I don't regret my time reading, and I'm still interested in the series as a whole simply for the fact that it's supposedly right up my alley, but this was really hard to get through.
I love a character driven story, and I love when fantasies really take their time with the world to allow the reader to explore and really feel immersed. I think the problem I had here was that all the build-up felt unnecessary.
The world itself is not complicated enough that we really need to dig into the details of political machinations, nor are the characters unique enough that we need to spend 80% of the book in the mundanity of their lives to really get a feel for what motivates them/what their challenges are. Yes, they were good characters, for the most part, I love unlikeable characters, but you have a good foundation for their characterizations pretty quickly. The world is just like every other medieval fantasy, and though I see the subversions taking root, I can't say my reading experience was bettered by spending the majority of the book in war rooms discussing the action happening off-page.
The way women were portrayed in this book was also ick, despite there being a huge lack of female characters at all. Sometimes I even felt like women didn't even exist in this world except Ardee, who basically served to be a motivation for one of our POV characters, and a plot device for the character arc of one of the secondary main characters. I hope her story gets a little more attention in the following books. Ferro, our only female POV character, has such an interesting (though not necessarily unique) characterization that makes her POV one of the standouts for me. The chapter that introduces her was my favorite out of all, I think.
And it kinda bugs me because Abercrombie is clearly a talented writer. He has a great ability for "show don't tell", as well as a dark, witty humor that really settles itself well in the world he's created. I don't really understand why he chose to write this book the way he did, so that the first book is almost like a prequel introducing the characters and world, rather than a fully-fledged first book with its own plot.
I don't regret my time reading, and I'm still interested in the series as a whole simply for the fact that it's supposedly right up my alley, but this was really hard to get through.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Death, Gore, Physical abuse, Slavery, Torture, Violence, Blood, Murder, War, and Injury/Injury detail