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This is not a book for everyone. Some will not enjoy a fantasy novel with fighting, with children from terrible situations being trained as warriors. For me, this was one of those books that was hard to put down. Reading a during lunch and breaks, etc. Other reviewers said the world building was unique and being the jaded fantasy reader I am, I was very skeptical. Other reviewers were correct! The world building is unique. That's all I will say, in the interest of avoiding spoilers. I recommend going into it knowing as little as possible about the setting, if you can. It was an enjoyable aspect of this book to discover the setting.
The characters! Oh, the characters are great. Depth, variety, talents, flaws, and frailties, even among magic using super warriors. Some characters I cared about, and others I just wanted to see what they would do, but it kept me interested.
The combat! There's a lot of combat. This is not a military history buff's sort of combat, but furious individual combat (on a more superhero level, some of it). I often expect there to be a lot of boring in combat scenes, but this book surprised me. Lawrence has done some interesting things with looking at how the way an angry child warrior, who can really fight, might use different moves in a fight than an adult, against an adult. It isn't smooth sailing choreography all the time, but sometimes it is brilliant. By all rights, a lot of these fight scenes should have been the boring stuff you skim through, to get past quickly, but these I actually read!
There are some wonderfully quotable lines, as others have mentioned. There are moment and scenes where you could just hear the epic soundtrack music playing as you read. This is a rough and cruel world. It is no fairytale, but good grief, it kept me so hooked, I devoured it in a single day. This was my first read by Mark Lawrence, but I'm definitely reading more!
