Unrelieved grimness in the form of unsympathetic characters performing reprehensible acts for no purpose other than revenge or being hired to help with revenge. ( )

I failed to care about the motivations of any character. Perhaps that was the point, but it doesn't result in a good read ( )

This extremely cynical book (alongside the previous books in this world) is the closest thing I read to anti-militaristic "epic" fantasy. ( )

THis was a dark book but I loved it none the less. I know Martin is the standard bearer for the new epic fantasy boom but Abercrombie is a magician. I will read everything he writes. ( )

I am really sad that this book fell by the wayside for me.
I very much enjoyed the truly dark and gritty setting.
Viewing a story from the perspective of arguably the bad guys was refreshing and well done. I think what the author was going for was truly ambiguous grey but it ended up more like almost black.
I don't think I have seen grey characters as well done as Abercrombie manages to anywhere else but for me, the story ended up trying too hard and eventually seemed to forget what it even wanted to accomplish.
Let's start with a rather petty criticism. Human bodies in this story are made of gelly. A three-year-old can accidentally behead someone with a butter knife in this world. It starts out fairly believable mainly because the MC had to survive so human sturdiness mostly prevailed but later on people lose their limbs just by being looked at wrong. And I am not talking about magic. It made it really hard for me to take even desperate and bloody massacres seriously.

Another problem with basically all action scenes was that the deciding factor always ended up being stupid luck. Like extreme, slip on a banana peel and impale yourself on a broom handle levels of stupid. I never at any point had the feeling any of these characters won a fight on their own merit at all. We are constantly told about how great the cast is but all we actually see is then stumbling around.
Maybe this was supposed to be a manifestation of Helmuth von Moltke's famous quote "No strategy survives first contact with the enemy." and was supposed to show how chaotic and random bloody battles like that can be but even if that was the intention it just came across as ridiculous.

Later on, the characters (and with them the story) start to devolve into caricatures of themselves.
I am not sure if this was intended to bring the true descent into insanity of some of these characters closer to the reader or something but if that was the intention it failed utterly for me. These supposedly extraordinary people started to act more and more stupid and decisions seemed less and less reasonable. TSTL came to mind repeatedly.

Especially around the poisoner, it seemed like even the author forgot what kind of personality he was supposed to have. I think of the whole cast, the poisoner is his worst character by far.

Furthermore, we have curious cases of amnesia. They employ various tools and tactics to solve problems but they never consider them again even if they would easily solve a problem later on as well. Instead, they have to come up with some absurdly contrived and overly complicated new plan.
What's obviously happening here is that the tools they have at their disposal are too powerful and to make things challenging the author needed to entirely abandon common sense sometimes.

I liked the unpredictability in general because it was clear that no one except the MC had plot armour of any kind. The author overdid it to a large degree for my taste though. Many deaths were really stupid and unnecessary and felt like the author screaming at me "SEE? MY CHARACTERS CAN ALL DIE! SEE? I JUST KILLED HIM! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME? I CAN KILL ANYONE AT ANY TIME!". Oh my god, I get it. Because of this constant in-your-face stuff I just desensitised to it all eventually and stopped caring about anyone. And what happens if the reader stops caring? He loses interest. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. But I guess a big part of the problem was the stupid ways people died. At some point, it almost started to feel like a final destination movie.

There seemed to be some kind of message in it all. With all the waxing poetic about the purpose of revenge and stuff but never getting to any kind of point. That was my feeling in general with this book in regards to many aspects. It just painfully refused to get to the point.

Something that is a pet peeve of mine is present in this book also. That being family excuses everything. This idea that family somehow is allowed to do to each other whatever they want and you forgive it all because "family" never sat right with me.
I know there are many families that teach this kind of thinking but I could never really see the difference between that and the typical brainwashing indoctrination methods of cults. At the end of the day, it's just an excuse to have someone you can abuse just like some cults do.
I am not saying deep family bonds like that can't exist but if they are true they develop naturally and I can for the life of me not see any such bond developing between the MC and her brother. But I guess all these characters are so incredibly deeply flawed that this actually is a rather minor point in the grand scheme of things.

I am at a point now at which I just don't care anymore what happens next. I am just tired of it all.
I dropped at around 70% I guess? Maybe a bit more. I didn't check when I gave up.

This all sounds scathing and I really stopped enjoying it at some point but many of my complaints are on a high level. Compared to the average shallow fantasy you find at every corner this is still a very well written book with a very unique feel to it. But as a more complex book, it also ended up having more complex issues. ( )