Book Report: The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie

I figured that since I've taken on the challenge of reading more, I'd include some old-fashioned book reports (or reviews if you like) in the blog.

The Blade Itself is Joe Abercrombie's first book. It also happens to be the first book of his trilogy The First Law. I pulled the title from a general list of Top 25 Best Fantasy Books. The library happened to have the whole trilogy, so I decided to get busy reading it.

The Best Part: This book is all about characterization. Abercrombie does a fantastic job creating the characters of Logen, Glokta, and Jezal. These seem to be the primary characters, though there is quite a bit of character development amongst the secondary characters as well. Glokta is particularly well written. Abercrombie's style is very easy to read, making the book hard to put down once you pick it up.

The Worst Part: The book is not much more than a characterization. Though I haven't read the second or third book of the trilogy, I imagine that this is a good introduction to them. You get to know the characters and some minor events occur. However, you really don't know at the end of the story what the heroes are doing or why they are doing it. This book could not exist on its own.

Life's Lessons Learned: The book has a few themes that you can pick up pretty quickly. The most apparent is that the extremes of good and evil don't manifest themselves in one human being. Good people do bad things, bad people do good things. Most of the time good and evil are relative to your perspective.

Rating: Like one of the main characters in the story, I give this book a Bloody-Nine fingers out of ten. The book left me chomping at the bit to start the next book in the series: Before They Are Hanged. However, it left me a little unsatisfied because nothing really happened of import - other than introducing us to a brilliant fantasy world and a fun set of characters.