The Lies of Locke Lamora

Fun read. A small amount of sorcery, but the winner in this book is deception (in case the title didn't give it away). As far as the writing style, I enjoyed the interspersed flashbacks throughout the book, but wish there would have been more foreshadowing instead of “ah ha! plot twist here.” Would recommend, and I'm continuing the series.

Well all of my GR people have enjoyed this book and I can see why, but the part most people seem to love (slippery people successfully being slippery through an ever-worsening series of events) is the part I found tedious. The rest, the standard - if well written - fantasy fare, I liked just fine.

So, I could probably go on to the rest, but not in a hurry.

This was a champion wee read. Great plot, cons within cons within cons. It got me out on longer dog walks just to get more of the story into me on the headphones. The pacing was just right, the characters — superb, and the moving around of the timeline for maximum surprise effect was deftly done. The performance of Michael Page in the @audibleuk audiobook was really well done too - great use of voices. Highly recommended. Thank you to the @theincomparable for the rec!

Listened to this one in the car. The reader on the audio book is very good, btw. The story moves along at a pretty good pace, but there's a good chunk of the book devoted to world building - which pays off at the end as it all comes together. It bounces back and forth between the main story and ‘interlude' flashbacks on the main character's early life. I found that a bit jarring at first, but got used to the rhythm of it after awhile. Enjoyed this one - and I look forward to the next one in the series.

I had pretty high hopes for this book, so it might be partly my own fault, but I'm a bit disappointed.

In theory I should have really loved this. The world is great and wonderfully detailed, and the characters all sound interesting, but for some reason it never fully clicked for me. Events were unfolding and I found myself struggling to care much, even if I knew that what was happening was exciting.

Though there were a few parts I really liked, and they were all around the first half of the middle and the very end. Especially the last few pages (excluding the epilogue) I really liked and was one of the first times this book made me feel something. Aside from a certain other absolutely terrible event.... Poor fellas :( I do love the Locke/Jean relationship, but it's not enough for me to love this book or to check out its sequels, unfortunately.

Took a little while to get into it but ended up not really wanting it to finish. Didn't mind the slightly weird juxtaposition of alien built landscapes against an Elizabethan era (at least that was my take) tale. Onto the next...

The first two-thirds of this book are absolutely fantastic - it's a character-driven heist story with a group of witty, likable characters that truly are gentlemen as much as they are bastards. The book takes a sharp turn after that, though - enough of one that I would classify the rest as a completely different genre - and it never quite regains the energy it had in the first part. Overall, though, it provides a nice story set in a fantasy world that manages to avoid the trappings of a “fantasy novel”.

There is this orphan that is good at stealing, and this guy who trains thieves. For some reason the “thief maker” needs to buy children in order to train them, there is no indication to why. Then he finds the boy to cause him too much trouble, so he sells him to a priest of the god of Trickery. I felt no immersion, no connection with the characters, no sympathy for the world or interest in the story. It could as well pass on present day. There is no fantasy here, nothing for me to care about.

Read 1:30 of 21:59 / 7%

I really liked this book.
I liked the worldbuilding behind the story, the little hints that there is more to this world than the story is telling, and that maybe if the author is kind enough, some day he'll tell you. I love ancient mysterious things in books, so I'm dying to know more of the people who used elderglass. It sounds a bit Lovecraftian to me.

I like that the main character is not your typical hero, and I love his relationship with his friends and mentor. Locke turned out to be quite an original character, and I very much think the world might explode if he and Harry Dresden got together, such are their skills at diplomacy and keeping their mouths shut when they should.

Somewhere around the middle of the story I felt that the the “Salvara game” plot was too much left aside in favor of the Grey King one, and I almost feared it wouldn't quite come back again. It did, and it was worth it, but I still felt that segment was a bit slower.

I love how it ended in a way that leaves space for sequels, but manages to finish the whole story at the same time.
Will probably read the sequels in the near future

İçine girebildiğim, karakterlerini gerçekten umursadığım kitaplarla sık karşılaşamıyorum artık. Locke Lamora'nın Yalanları da güzel kurgulanmış bir hikayeye sahip olsa da, sonunda bana Kvothe'u daha çok özletmekten fazlasını yapamadı.

I wrote a book review for this one and posted it to my blog! You can read it here: The Crafty Nerd's Book Review: The Lies of Locke Lamora

I actually didn't really like this book. Much at all. I'm actually a little concerned about reviewing it because everyone I know loves this book. And I didn't. sigh There are things I want to say though, so we're going to do this bullet point style.

Things I Disliked About This Book

The Language
Yeah, totally not fair adding this here, because I did know about it going into the story, but I really fail to see the point of it. After page one hundred it quit being either entertaining or shocking and just showed that they had no other way to get their point across. What also made me wonder was the way the lower class and the nobles all used the same type of foul language. It's not that, in a book with this much cursing, I think the nobility wouldn't curse, but the same exact curse word in the same exact way? That doesn't seem believable.

The Violence/Gore
I love fight scenes. I mean, seriously, give me an epic fantasy fight and I am all over that thing. But I really, really don't want to read torture scenes. I especially don't want to read about a guy getting smothered by a burlap bag filled with shards of glass. Ugh. And then our ‘hero' get's tortured while we're inside his head. Of course, we kind of just skim through his head, so that's not as bad as it could have been. And lets not even talk about the drowning in horse urine. (How did they get enough to fill two barrels of it anyway?)

Play Fair With Me
And for the love off all that's good, quit jumping around in the timeline! Not only is each really, really long chapter rotated with a shorter chapter about Locke's childhood, but the stuff in the chapters aren't in sequence. I think it was chapter two or three that really did this with a Leverage-esque stunt of showing how they accomplished something after they already accomplished it. I'm willing to mostly forgive this in TV shows (especially the ones that do it consistently) but books... I don't like being jerked around. I don't like getting some of the information and then ‘oh, I lied'. That's not even unreliable narrator - that's unreliable author. (Both which go a long way to explaining why I hated The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.)

Short Snippets
I've heard books get lambasted before for short chapters but, because most of those books follow the same characters in a linear pattern, it doesn't usually bother me. Now I understand just how annoying it can be. Some of the little numbered segments inside the chapters are barely two pages worth. And that is compounded by either skipping back and forth between two or more characters - or me not understanding at all why this segment needs to be separate from the one that came before or the one after it.

The Mob Feeling
That I don't like. Ever. It leaves me uncomfortable and bored. I don't like it and started feeling like that's what the book was about as opposed to thieves - which the main characters aren't, but I'll get to that later. I simply do not like the ‘gritty' fantasy. Ones that try to be ‘realistic' or the commonly called ‘grimdark' fantasy. This, actually, explains a lot about my problems with this book.

Now, Things I Have Mixed Feelings About

The World Building
Okay, I will admit, this is a very unique world and I like it. What I don't like however, is how we get told every little thing about the world. These bridges connect from here to there but these bridges connect from here to here. Oh, we have a special gladiatorial competition between women and...sharks... How is this important? And I really don't need to know all this about the convicts. Unless that's foreshadowing. Why do I need to know how to play handball? There were a few things I was curious about, that weren't expounded upon until the last half of the book. Honestly, this reminds me of the problems I've had with Sanderson's books. I don't need two pages of description for every one of dialogue. Actually, I don't even think I got that much dialogue. Some people like this - as evidenced by Sanderson's popularity - but I don't.

I Was Promised Thieves
I received con artists. Yes, there is actually a difference and I, unlike most people it seems, prefers thieves to the con artists. There's something that it much more satisfying to me about cat burglars, second story men and those that walk into a party and walk out with all the jewelry than the long con people. I don't know... I can't really explain it, but I do like con artists - and really like them being the ‘heroes' of a story - but I don't like them as much as thieves.

What I Liked About The Book

The Gentlemen Bastards
I love friends that are there for each other no matter what but will snark and banter the whole time. So, no surprise that I liked these guys so much. However... I didn't ever feel a connection to them. It's like we were just skimming along the surface of their personalities. It didn't even bother me when people started dropping like flies. And that's not because I knew deaths were coming - I have, after all, read some books a second time and cried as much over the death/s as I did the first time. Rather, it seems more like I was kept emotionally distant. No one else had this problem, so maybe their personalities just didn't work for me.

All said and done, this book left me vaguely nauseous and entirely bored. I can see why some people would like it - there's a certain market for these types of books, after all - but it just wasn't for me.

(Originally posted on my blog: http://pagesofstarlight.blogspot.com/)

Debatiendome entre 3 y 4 estrellas.

Por un lado el mundo es increible, muy creible y detallado, religion, sociedad, etc.
Por otro lado aunque al principio son interesantes despues de un libro entero los interludios entre capitulos se hacen muy pesados.
Ademas Locke tira mas a tonto que a listo por mucho que se diga de el. Se equivoca muchisimo y eso es practicamente lo que hace avanzar el drama y conflicto. En cambio Jean lo hace todo perfecto, no se por que Locke es el jefe.

I am struggling to get into this book. It has an average of 4.27 out of 5 on Goodreads (over 63,000 people rated it) but I am just not an adult fantasy kind of girl. I hope I change my mind or this is going to take a loonnnngg time to finish. I need to go drink some red wine now as my head hurts from trying to care about what I was reading.

Fast forward a month later from when I wrote my initial review... A few friends of mine loved this book, I quit after 125 pages. I refuse to bother trying to care about Locke or this story any longer.

There's nothing quite like a great con.
I like that this wasn't perfect, they're just people, who happen to be great thieves and con artists. They make mistakes like everyone else, and they have great victories like everyone else.
An awesome fun story. I really enjoyed it.

I really wasn't expecting to like this book as much as I did. It seemed like it would be a throw-away plot of an orphan being raised into the world of thieves, but it turned out to be so much more. I usually breeze through the world-building explanations because too many seem overly convoluted. There's a bit of that in here, but each place and each piece of history explained in the Interlude chapters actually matters and helps explain the different personas and situations Locke and his friends get into.

What really hooked me was how smart Scott Lynch's written situations came to be. There were a couple reveals in the book that just left me saying, “that's badass” out loud. It just shows some expert craftsmanship by the author and really solidified my determination to read the rest of the series. There's even a “Red Wedding”-type scene and it's refreshing to read something like the Game of Thrones series where the author isn't scared into making sure everyone has a happy ending.

I may just jump right into the next book, which I almost never do in a series, because I really enjoy Locke as a character and his thought process to enduring his life of thievery and morality. Also, whenever Jean picks up the Wicked Sisters to do battle, I'm fully engaged and imagining every move he makes as perfectly written by Lynch.

Of the “fantasy”-esque books I've read, this ranks in my top 3 for sure; if not my favorite. We'll see how the rest of the books play out!

4.5 stars.

good book. can't. wait to see the movie

4.5 stelle e mezzo. La mia opinione, seppur striminzita, è nei commenti.

I wasn't sure about this book at first, but it grew on me very quickly and leaped into that five star slot. I've been hearing wonderful things about this series for ages, but I thought I've just read too many similar titles to really love it. Lynch takes the idea of he Thief King and runs with it in directions I didn't even know existed. The whole thing has a very Medieval Catch Me If You Can vibe that I found downright charming.

Let me start with the worldbuilding. Lynch's world is almost science-fictional with the populace living amongst the wreckage of a unknown elder civilization. It's a world where alchemy, magic, and questionable medical practice all function according to a strict set of rules. Camorr, the main setting, is almost a canal city with the ocean (and its denizens) playing a huge part in the story telling. While the setting is similar to a medieval Earth, it's different enough that this doesn't feel like Fantasy Stock Setting #6.

Then there's the characters. Locke Lamora is a brilliant anti-hero with a perfect team. He's the thief who just likes thieving, and has since he was old enough to grab. He's balanced out by a string of flaws which are clearly flaws but don't make him any less likable. Locke's team is just as engaging, and Lynch really knows how to twist a person's heart in a way George R.R. Martin never really has for me.

The antagonists are just as engaging, and no one in this story is particularly in the right. We side with Locke because it's told from his viewpoint, but this could just as easily be told from the Gray King's perspective, and I would side with him almost the whole time (up to that murdering business...). The Salvara's were a prize. They could so easily have been stock nobility without any depth or will, but Lynch makes them understandable, forward-thinking, and capable. Sophia is a great addition as a background female scientist/alchemist. There aren't many ladies in the foreground, but I think having them in the background is almost more important in this kind of setting. Lynch makes a point of mentioning female guards, female soldiers, and female townsfolk in every scene. I assume Sabetha has a large part to play later in the series, but even with a boy's club of heroes, women are still movers in this story, and that's always been of great importance to em.

The writing is solid, and while the beginning dragged on a bit, once the Gray King storyline started moving, I couldn't put it down. The dialogue snaps, the action pulses, and I'm very surprised this hasn't been brutally murdered as a feature film by now. It seems so perfect, I just know it would be screwed up royally.

I have a few books with deadlines to read before I can pick up the rest of the trilogy, but I will definitely be doing so. Recommended to anyone who likes a clever action fantasy.

7\10

The Lies of Locke Lamora is part fantasy, part mystery, and part heist. Locke Lamora has been trained since his youth to run the city's high class gang of thieves, The Gentleman Bastards. He is in the middle of a particularly well thought-out plan when the natural order of the city is disrupted by the arrival of the mysterious Grey King. Locke and his friends must solve the mystery in the attempt to prevent total chaos from descending on the city of Camorr.

I have to say I am not entirely sure how much I really liked this book. Perhaps it was my flu-induced ADD, but I found myself oscillating between being thoroughly entertained and mildly bored. Normally I am one who loves descriptive passages, and the world of Camorr is wonderfully different from so many other fantasy realms, yet by the end of the story I was getting tired of what I felt were repetitive explanations. I will say that I did love the interactions between the Gentleman Bastards - my only complaint is that there weren't enough of them! Perhaps I am just a sucker for the large group of friends working to pull off a bit of sneakery, but I really wish we had gotten to see more interactions of the team plotting, planning, and working together.

The tone of the story runs from good-natured jesting between the Gentleman Bastards to rather explicit violence between mortal enemies. I have to say I am not one to be put off by violence or offensive language in books, but for some reason I didn't feel like they naturally flowed in this story. I found the tone of the characters to change too often at odd times. Granted, as con artists, that should be something they are quite skilled at, but the timing of it made the main characters feel too inconsistent. Their use of language kept throwing me out of the story and into modern day. Well, that and everyone's need to give lengthy exposition on their terrible sad childhood. I mean, giving people terrible sad childhood stories is a great way to build a character - but I don't necessarily believe they are all going to sit around and actually talk about it after beating the crap out of each other.

I will say that the end of the story was quite exciting though - which conflicts my feelings even more. With about a hundred pages to go I was reading just to finish it, but with about sixty left I was reading because I wanted to know what was going to happen. The conclusion was satisfying, though this story did leave several important things unanswered (well, really, barely touched upon them at all), which I suppose is a good way to convince us to read more of the series.

There has been talk on the internets about the possibility of this becoming a movie. I have to say I actually think it would make a much better TV show than a full length film. Partially because I feel like it would be difficult to reduce all of the nuances of the plot to only a few hours, but also because the way Scott Lynch breaks down the chapters feels very episodic and almost soap-opera-esque in style. Also, I think the “mystery” portion of the story would play up better over the course of a season rather than in the time constraints of a film. I don't know if it would be possible to retain quite the... flavor... of the characters in a TV series, but I think it would be better for developing the overall mystery and plot. Especially if it were taken on by a network like HBO. Normally I am on team “The Book is Better,” but in this case I might actually be more excited by a well done television series than I am by the novels. I would definitely love to see the world of Camorr on screen though - be it big or small.

So, I don't know how I feel about the first book of the Gentleman Bastards series. I suppose I did enjoy it, off an on, but I also didn't feel like the story was quite as tight as I wanted it to be. I liked the characters, but I never really fell in love with any of them. I still have a lot of questions about their pasts, but I am not sure how much time I want to put into finding out the answers. Also, I can't be entirely sure how much my hesitation comes from having to read the book in pieces, how much from having the flu, and how much from the writing of the book itself. This might be another book I have to file under the “written for dudes” category. Certainly a lot of things I can see some of my male friends getting really excited about that sort of left me disinterested. I mean, I think there is enough interest for me to pick up the second book in the series, Red Seas Under Red Skies, but probably not right away. Definitely want to give the series another shot, but I am going to wait until I am no longer suffering from flu-induced ADD brain fog, and until I have time to sit down and read it without lengthy interruptions.

Lots of cool ideas. Fantasy novel, some magic but not too much. All of the Big Ideas seem so to be really well though out.

I can't help but hold books like this up against The Name of the Wind. It's not as good as that but I'd recommend it based on what I've read so far, for sure.

This is a must read!

This book is officially my favorite of the last five years. Read it.