Reviews with content warning for Cursing - The Lies of Locke Lamora

Reviews tagging 'Cursing'

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

55 reviews

al_dahart's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional funny mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

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enchantedobjects's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I just finished a bizarre but awesome book. I can't remember a book thag made me so throughly on my seat for each successive xon. At its heart its about a band of thieves who con their way through a venice-adjacent town. The best part of the book is that its a constant strife to do so but its their brotherhood that sticks the success of each of their cons. And many of the time the success is filled with getting the shit kicked out of you over and over.
It is 700 pages of brotherhood, conning the rich, expanisve lore of one venice-adjacent city, and getting up after you've been throughly drowned in piss.
It has my favourite underground crime syndicate system. Its 13 priesthood is lovingly detailed. These lads are not mary-sues in any definition. The interludes are a welcome break and also incredibly important for the main narrative.
Also, gladiatorial shark fighting.
This book, while being a trilogy, can be treated as a stand-alone. I will likely read the sequels just because these con-lads mischief is worth reading more of.

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emeraldrina's review against another edition

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adventurous dark funny tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.25

I’m honestly really baffled by all the rave reviews of this book… it was a fun heist story in a unique and quirky fantasy world, but nothing particularly special or great. There were quite a lot of major flaws that unfortunately really took away from the book’s highlights.

I’ll start with the good - the world building is incredible. It’s intricate, original, and holds so many mysteries yet to be answered. The descriptions are beautiful and detailed, making it easy to picture this strange world.

But therein also lies one of the major downfalls of the book - there’s far too much world building detail and description throughout the book. Between every chapter there’s an “interlude” - initially these are all flashbacks to the characters’ past to give insight into how or why they’re doing certain things now. But about halfway through the book the interludes just turn into unnecessary world building info dumps that jar the reader out of the story. Many of these are superfluous - the information was already conveyed in a more interesting manner via the main story, as it should be. The rest are just pointless to the main story, and feel more like the author is insisting on showing off exactly how much work he put into his world building.

Likewise with the descriptions - they’re written not as part of the story, but in the author’s voice, butting in between the action to tell us as much detail as he can because he wrote it all and doesn’t want it to go to waste. They’re beautifully written, but they’re not in the POV character’s voice, so they don’t feel like part of the story. They feel like unnecessary interruptions.

As for the characters, they mostly have clear voices and personalities and flaws. However, the main character is utterly lacking in internal conflict. Up until the villain shows up (which is waaaay too late in the book), Locke had no real goal or motivation in life. He has a major flaw, but no related overarching misbelief about the world or fear that’s driving him to act in ways counter to his goal. He’s just … a thief stealing money for the sake of it. He never learns anything, never transforms, never really changes at all. And this is why the first couple hundred pages of the book are such a drag - we don’t care about Locke because he has no internal conflict. We start caring a bit when the inciting attack fiiiinally happens near the halfway point, but this is still just external conflict. So even after that initial attack, there weren’t really any different stakes for Locke than for anyone else in that situation. So we still didn’t care all that much.

The final problem is the schemes. They’re supposed to be genius level clever… but they’re not. They’re quite frankly idiotic. They seem to have been purposely designed to fail easily - which of course they have. But only the author should know that, not the readers! The gaping holes in the schemes in turn make the plot transparently predictable. Which is even less fun than usual in a heist story.

I really didn’t hate the book as much as this makes it sound. The dialogue was amusing, the world was fascinating, and the prose was lovely. It just fell a lot flatter than I was expecting after reading so many great reviews.

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dragonaion's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional funny inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This book is brilliant, a wild ride, and I was delightfully surprised. I thought this would be a story of a petty thief who would get caught and end up escaping in a new Robin Hood retelling. What I got was something completely in a world of its own that has almost made me cry repeatedly. What can only be described as "grunge fantasy" (high fantasy 1,000 years post societal collapse in the slums of New York) this has more heart, love, and sheer brilliance than almost any other book I've read to date. Every moment, every interlude, weaves together in such a way that turns this from a story into art, following a batch of characters that are relatable, lovable, and wears no plot armor. I cannot gush more about how amazing and unique this book is- if you have fond memories of the concept of the brotherhood in Theives, this is just the story for you.
"Liar... Liar... Liar... Bastard!"

Edit: I've found another book that is a sibling-story to this. If you enjoyed The Lies of Locke Lamora, you will absolutely feel right at home with Nevernight by Jay Kristoff.

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