The Blade Itself

"History is littered with dead good men."

I…. don’t know what to make of this book. It’s a good book! Lots of people agree! Fabulous worldbuilding! Interesting characters! Great prose! I just came away from parts of the book wondering if there was maybe too much worldbuilding in the first, oh, 60% of the book, and not enough crumbs of action dropped to keep me invested.

There’s not one or two viewpoints to summarize here. Instead, we get a whole fully developed cast of characters we bounce between, with their own involvements and plot lines going on within the world the author fleshes out for us. It isn’t until near the end of the book that some of these characters start meeting up with one another and the plot starts moving though, so if slow burn epic fantasy isn’t your thing, you might have a hard time getting through it.

I will say that as soon as the plot started moving, I was all in on what the author was bringing. I also hear that book two is when things really hit their stride, so I’m looking forward to that experience as well. Getting to that point took me a while, though, and I kept putting the book down for other reads and only reading it in small chunks up until the last 20% or so.

There’s definitely something here though, and I’m going to try and make time for book two sometime soon before I forget everything from book one.