The Heroes

Too. Many. Fight Scenes.

I already expected this book to be a low point of the series for me, and I pretty much got just that.

I frequently skip entire fight scenes and major parts of battles unless the author really manages to make them captivating and unpredictable. Unfortunately, Abercrombie is not one of those authors. His fantastic prose takes a step back to get closer to the action, but the individual combat scenes drag on for too long without interesting twists and turns. Accordingly, a book that consists of about 50% battles was a pain to get through for me.

The point that Abercrombie is trying to make about male ideals of heroism is a little too dull and gets explored to its fullest extent too early in the book to carry the rest, so the second third of the book lacks focus and coherence. Everyone's fighting, that's it. After the fantastic character work in his previous books, this seemed to me like an experiment that failed.