"Someday, Locke Lamora," he said, "someday you're going to fuck up so magnificently, so ambitiously, so overwhelmingly that the sky will light up and the moons will spin and the gods themselves will shit comets with glee. And I just hope I'm still around to see it."

"Oh please," said Locke. "It'll never happen."

I'm so torn with this. On one hand, Locke Lamora is an extremely enjoyable character to follow, and his adventures end up being so entertaining as the plot rolls along. On the other hand, it takes for-fucking-ever for the plot to appear, and there are tons upon tons of interludes that involve world building. This is a pretty damn great world that Scott Lynch has built, but was most of it necessary? I like slow build up. Hell, The Wire is one of my favorite TV shows. But this book could have been a good 200 pages shorter.

Still, this earns four stars, and at least I know what I'll be going into when I eventually get to the next book.