Azoth is a guild rat, something akin to a homeless, street urchin. His life is marked by hopelessness and thievery. Like most of the others in the guild, Azoth lives under the foot of the Rat, guild leader, more of a bully than anything else.

But Azoth has dreams of a life different from the one he lives with his friends, Jarl and Doll-Girl. He wants to lead a life without fear, a life in which he isn’t beaten into submission by the Rat, a life in which he has more than a stale piece of bread to share with the mute Doll-Girl.

It is this dream of a life that makes him yearn to be an apprentice of Durzo Blint. But Blint is no ordinary man. He isn’t an ordinary assassin either. He is a wetboy, an assassin of the highest order. Being his apprentice would certainly mean a future for Azoth, a future he wouldn’t have a shot at being a part of the guild. But it would also means giving up whatever little he has, becoming a hardened criminal, burying his emotions and sentiments forever, but most of all changing his identity and becoming an entirely new person.

As Azoth struggles to become someone else entirely there are many truths, many a magical elements for him to discover but most of all he has to choose between forging a future for himself and forgoing his past.

An interesting start to a series that I’m sure holds more intrigue in the succeeding books. While not entirely full of unexpected twists, it is quite a nice read. The author could have made use of better vocabulary, read wetboy to mean a dangerous assassin, well… that doesn’t quite convey the tone the character is supposed to convey. On the contrary, every time you read the word it makes you giggle just a bit. Well, as a girl, I’m allowed to have that reaction.

Still, despite a couple of hiccups, a recommended read for all those fantasy and series lovers. ( )

I started quite frustrated. I wrote in the forum "I'm 50 pages in, and I'm not very enthusiastic. The plot is OK. The setting is fine. The characters are trope-ish, but I'm fine with that. My main problem is that the writing is amateurish and unsubtle. I'm resisting, but I'm thinking about cutting my losses and moving on."

Someone advised me to soldier on, and I did. It got better as I got into the story. Unfortunately, Week's unsubtle writing remained a problem for me, but the story was interesting, and I ended up enjoying it. I can't enthusiastically recommend it, but I enjoyed it enough to consider reading the next one to see how the story continues. ( )

addestramento di un sicario
invasione di un regno
artefatti magici ( )

The Way of Shadows was quite bad. The writing was poor, the plot was badly paced, the characters were all strangely misogynistic (which can work sometimes if you sell it in the context of the world, but he completely did not do that). By the end I was basically laboring to finish it, still without a solid grasp of all the words.

Future writers of fantasy, if you can flip to a page of your book and there are 10 words on it that you cant define ex-ante, the book is probably terrible.
( )

F/SF