dsvcyber's Reviews (19)

An epic tale told from the perspective of three different characters on their own quests who’s path converge towards the end. I honestly found the Norse/Viking parts to be distracting from the narrative as there are frequent use of such words that required to think about what the author is referring to such as bairn, jarl, and many other words (some even requiring knowledge of how to pronounce them properly). The worst is the magic where magic wielding characters are calling out spells that you will have no idea how to read or what they mean. All those things combined to irritate me to no end and I found myself not even bothering to read through the sentences of spells. In my opinion, if you’re going to write something that most people will not know how to properly read or pronounce, then don’t bother with writing it down and instead use descriptions that your audience will understand and connect with.
Ultimately, those are the things that bogged down the story and made it hard to connect to characters and the world.
The action scenes are fine but are also inconsistent where one of the characters tells someone to not rush to action and wait for more opportune time to attack, yet shortly after goes against the advice and jumps into a fight where they are outnumbered. This was so bizarre even the author has one of the characters make a comment on it.
Decent book with an epic scope if you can look past some glaring flaws.

Along with The Hobbit, this novel comes up on a lot of must-read lists of fantasy books. I honestly struggled with this one. The world is wonderful and interesting but I struggled with the writing. Written in a whimsical story-teller style, it read clunky and repetitive with poor punctuation. I’ve found myself rereading sentences and sometimes entire paragraphs because I felt like commas, periods, colons, and semicolons should have been added in many places, which made it hard to understand exactly what the authors intent was, making the writing seem rushed and unclear.
Much of the book is spent with the character traveling between different islands meeting people who are insignificant to the story or the plot. There is a deeper meaning within the plot of how we spend our entire lives battling against the dark forces within ourselves but it is told in a way that is meandering and tiresome.
It’s not a bad book, I just found it boring and poorly written.

There are a lot of incongruous things happening in a short time. Shadowy figures tracking down a talisman and chasing a boy that has it. Only to pass him by when he is hidden from sight by magic for a brief moment and not able to track it when magic is lifted moments later. Curses that are symbols. A barista makes a drink for a sorceress and then pours her a refill from budget coffee pot. No one pays for their drinks. The barista is going to the magical school but maybe not? It’s all clumsy and not consistent in a tone of a 16 year old. The descriptions are there but they’re flat and off and hard to connect with.

The premise is simple: a long lost princess escorted by a ragtag group of rejects to reclaim her place on the throne. Except the princess is an orphan that grew up on the streets as a thief and a liar and doesn’t believe in her royal destiny but is simply using it as a way to con her way into some coin and not being beaten or, for once, not being hungry. The ragtag group of rejects are a magician/necromancer hell-bent on escaping this task, a warrior cursed to not being able to die, a pirate wench with unparalleled skill with daggers, a vampire, a Viking werewolf, a vanishing elf, and a self-serving monk.

The delivery is a hilarious tale filled with gratuitous violence, repeated jabs at organized religion in general and Catholic religion in particular, self-loathing protagonists, a pinch of mythology, a dash of fantasy, and a tablespoon of magic. This may sound like a bizarre recipe for a book, but Joe Abercrombie has cooked up quite possibly my favorite tale of all time.

If you’ve read any of Abercrombie’s books you may be familiar with his signature humor and ability to inject comedy into even most dark, violent, and desperate situations. His ability to do so in The Devils is dialed up considerably and is non-stop. The best way to describe this tale for someone that is into dark and inappropriate humor is that it’s an occult mishmash of The Boys, Suicide Squad, and the Peacemaker set in a twisted alternate reality of medieval Europe and Middle-East.

I can’t think of any other book I’ve ever read that has entertained me more than The Devils. Already, I can’t wait for the next entry. I want to hear more about those dumplings…

This is a tough book to rate as it is very informative but extremely general. There is also inconsistencies with the target audience this book attempts to focus on. It fluctuates between explaining the very basics of concepts to bringing up advanced topics with little to no guidance. For example, it takes the reader through the basics of networking and hardware only to delve into configuration settings and YAML and JSON format without much explanation of what things mean.