I’m a mood reader most of the time. If I’m into mystery, it can only be mystery. History, same. True crime, yep. When I’m reading other stuff, I’m always envious. I rarely feel like I’m reading what I want.
Rarely am I in the mood for fantasy. I do get there sometimes but not often. Part of that is the paucity of fantasy titles that hold my interest. I love A Song of Ice and Fire but can’t do Lord of the Rings and not much else has caught me, save for Joe Abercrombie’s Third Law series.
When the new series kept getting delayed, I’d written him off. Even when he became one of the few fantasy writers to live out his word and put up new work (coughcough George RR Martin and Patrick Rothfuss), I was neither in a fantasy mood or just didn’t feel like getting to it.
I’m a moron. Abercrombie is fantastic. This one banged just as hard as the First Law trilogy did.
Really, what Abercrombie is doing here is a sort of Force Awakens routine: a reboot masquerading as a sequel. A lot of familiar themes are visited: the silliness of war, the folly of power, forbidden love, etc. But the man just writes it so well. He creates rich mythology only to let his characters cut it to ribbons. He creates deep relationships that falter at realistic but painful circumstances. He creates a world that functions until it doesn’t, that is changing (this time, quite literally as it enters the industrial age) but stubbornly, and whose powers are terrified…but who still have power.
I will not wait long to down the other two in this series.