The Blade Itself – Frustratingly Good

Rob H. Bedford’s latest review on SFFWorld is up. This time, he proclaims his “frustration” with Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself. “Abercrombie is a damned frustrating writer. He writes so well and his story is so infectious it is difficult to stop reading and even thinking about the layers of his story and world.”

Very gratifying to me are the comparisons with George R R Martin, Greg Keyes, and Scott Lynch. “The novel bears some comparison to Greg Keyes Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone and Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire for the multiple points-of-view and aforementioned wide screen action…” and “One thing I like a lot about Abercrombie’s writing was something I enjoyed about Scott Lynch’s writing – attitude.“

I’ve never read GRRM’s fantasy (I know, I know), but Keyes’ The Briar Kingis a favorite of mine as well as a yardstick for quality, whereas I picked up the Lynch when I was considering The Blade Itself specifically because I knew that Gollancz had marketed them together in the UK and I wanted to see how they compared. (I found them tonally very similar, which was one of the many data points that encouraged me to pick up Abercrombie.) So yeah, Rob, couldn’t agree more!