Book Review: The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie

The Blade Itself
(The First Law #1)
by Joe Abercrombie

Publication Date: September 8th 2015
Publisher: Orbit
Pages: 536
Genre: Fantasy
Source: Own

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Logen Ninefingers, infamous barbarian, has finally run out of luck. Caught in one feud too many, he’s on the verge of becoming a dead barbarian – leaving nothing behind him but bad songs, dead friends, and a lot of happy enemies.

Nobleman Captain Jezal dan Luthar, dashing officer, and paragon of selfishness, has nothing more dangerous in mind than fleecing his friends at cards and dreaming of glory in the fencing circle. But war is brewing, and on the battlefields of the frozen North they fight by altogether bloodier rules.

Inquisitor Glokta, cripple turned torturer, would like nothing better than to see Jezal come home in a box. But then Glokta hates everyone: cutting treason out of the Union one confession at a time leaves little room for friendship. His latest trail of corpses may lead him right to the rotten heart of government, if he can stay alive long enough to follow it.

Enter the wizard, Bayaz. A bald old man with a terrible temper and a pathetic assistant, he could be the First of the Magi, he could be a spectacular fraud, but whatever he is, he's about to make the lives of Logen, Jezal, and Glotka a whole lot more difficult.

Murderous conspiracies rise to the surface, old scores are ready to be settled, and the line between hero and villain is sharp enough to draw blood.

My Thoughts

This book one is extremely character focus and I very much feel that it is a set up for the rest of the series. I went into this books knowing very little. This is a spoiler free review, but as I continue on with series because I will be continuing on with the series I all my sequel reviews may contain spoilers.

Like I said early this is a super character focused story, we get six characters point of view. There are three main characters I would say and then three characters that are very important supporting characters. In this book we spend time really getting to know these characters their back stories their motivation what makes them different. What I like about the characters, they are not your typical good guy facing off against the bad guy.  They are morally gray characters. The characters were fantastic in this book this is something that author obviously put a lot of attention to and he did it really well. The characters are very believable I feel like I know them very well but I also feel like any of them could surprise me at any moment.  

All of the great the character work was fantastic but was there really much going on outside of the character. It was a fairly contained story. I don't necessarily think that's a fault to this book it's just something that made me think that the author really wanted book one to be about the characters and then he is gonna build onto the story in the remaining books.

Let me go ahead and emphasize to you this book was really good. I loved this book and I'm so excited for the book two.


xoxo,
Shon