Finally! The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie

I’m glad I finally got a chance to start this series and what a beginning this is. I’ve read Heroes and it was wonderful to go back to the start and see how these characters were first introduced. Warning – Swears ahead.

So normally I’m a bit of a plot fiend. I need it, want it, got to got to have it. So it was a surprise when I found myself two hundred pages in and thought ‘hang on what’s actually going on in this thing”. Quick check of the blurb revealed it was about four major characters and I had established there but there was little to nothing in terms of telling me what the overall deal was. There was conspiracies being uncovered by the sympathetic and ingenious Glotka, a man with such a horrific past that you cannot help but be on his side despite the way he delights in torturing confessions from anyone he suspects. Jezel, a man struggling to find the motivation to leave a life of drinking and whoring behind in order to win THE fencing competition and fulfil his potential. Logan, known as the Bloody Nine and a character I had heard of only in reputation, spends much of the book wandering around enjoying the fact that he continues to lives his shitty life. One would expect a story that begins with a troop of men losing their leader would at some stage happen upon their leader again, especially when they were often only removed by a single degree of separation, but no, strangely enough I had no problem with any of this. I have given up on books much shorter because 100 pages in, I didn’t know enough to continue, so why was I so content to just let the events play out as Joe saw fit?

Fucked if I know to be honest!

All I know is that as I put down The Blade Itself I was picking up Before They Were Hanged and as I write this I am half way though. Joe has written such a range of magnificent multi dimensional characters that the fact that there is a war being fought on several fronts by our protagonists seems unimportant compared to what they are going through moment to moment. I was utterly invested at all times and I am so stoked I have another three or four books to read to complete this series. I can see myself reading them all back to back and then finishing with a reread of Heroes.