Half a World
An excellent read and left me feeling incredibly relieved and grateful that we only have to wait six months for the final installment.
To give this story and the characters within the span they deserve, Joe has skipped us ahead an unannounced amount of time. Not a huge amount but enough for Yarvi to be installed as first minister and be facing an entirely new set of problems. If he was good a politics in the first book, we see now he has progressed to being a master and the way he manoeuvres those around him is nothing short of brilliant. Not to say every ploy works the way he plans, not at all, but even the way failures are dealt with shows us an insight into a character that never seems to stop learning and is constantly reviewing the circumstances of everyone and everything around him. One of the things I love about Yarvi is that written differently, he could have been the arch enemy of the fair hero by playing the incredibly smart and conniving crippled advisor to the madman trying to take over the world. How often have we hated those advisors like Wormtounge and every role this guy ever played?
Despite running the show in more ways than one, Yarvi is not our protagonist on this leg of the journey. Instead we have the characters of Thorn and Brand, who could not be more different and, we feel from the start, are destined to end up together. Thorn is a young woman born with the spirit of Mother Way coursing through her blood who is seeking revenge for the death of her father. Desperate to become a warrior for her people and earn her chance to fight as an equal of the men around her, she is eventually given the chance to train with someone who has the ability to turn her into a weapon so deadly she will redefine what it means to be a woman in battle. She just rocks and some of her fight scenes and the torture she endures to become tough as shit are exhausting and just edge of your fucking seat writing.
Brand is the strong, silent type who yearns for the bond of being part of a team of fighting men, until his need to be good and do good things, costs him the chance he has worked for his whole life. He is incredibly selfless and seems to be bred from the old stock of heroes like Druss such is his level of integrity and strength of will. Thankfully the path that Yarvi sets him on gives him the chance to grow into the person he could be in a far more suited manner than simply raiding and killing as part of the village army.
The use of two character viewpoints certainly allows Joe to put more in here for the YA crowd and he skillfully handles the problem of communicating bad communication. We often see both sides of a frustrating conversation, generally centred on their seemingly unrequited, but in reality only unestablished, mutual affection for each other. The fact that both characters are going through the same thing in a different manner is constantly reinforced and makes this just as much a book for the girls as the boys. The final moments of this book are amazing and left me wanting to strangle Joe for not giving us just one more chapter.
