Scan barcode
A review by vermidian
The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks
1.0
I made it 91 pages and then I quit reading. I found this incredibly difficult to get into for a number of reasons.
For one, the world building is incredibly hard to understand and picture. They throw out a bunch of terms about the type of buildings, but those terms mean little when you have no meaningful visual references to them. Mostly they seemed to borrow from more "exotic" real world cultures, becoming caricatures of those cultures, and yet all of the heroes seemed to be white males - save maybe one, who they indicated might be a person of color. The descriptors for the people and the countries were increasingly vague. Maybe I would have understood more once Azoth got out into the world more, but I'm not sure that I cared enough about any of the characters to worry about it.
There were five main character from whom you get to see the world in this book, at least as far as I read. All of them were men. They were all fairly similar in personality, save the little lord who seemed to be kind of sweet. I didn't particularly latch onto any of them because, again, they seemed like caricatures. It was kind of like reading a D&D campaign where you can tell they have an idea of what their character is like but it isn't fully fleshed out when they started writing.
And let's talk about the fact that Rat, the villain in the first 90 pages, is the only person with interest in more than one gender. And the way that the author chooses to express this interest? Sexual assault. I'm sorry, but when all the other characters are conceivably straight and you make only your villain bisexual, it reads like you think non-straight people are pedophiles and rapists. That may not have been the author's intention, but that's how it came across to me.
The writing style is also not particularly interesting. It's not bad, but it isn't good either. There's no descriptive flair, nothing happens that isn't entirely predictable. It's just... blah.
Obviously, I didn't finish this book. It was 650 pages and at 91 pages, I found I just wasn't interested in forcing myself through the remaining pages. This book came recommended to me by a college friend (I'm sorry Mike!), but I can't pass that recommendation down I'm sorry to say. If you're reading this review and considering reading this book, just keep walking. There are better books.
For one, the world building is incredibly hard to understand and picture. They throw out a bunch of terms about the type of buildings, but those terms mean little when you have no meaningful visual references to them. Mostly they seemed to borrow from more "exotic" real world cultures, becoming caricatures of those cultures, and yet all of the heroes seemed to be white males - save maybe one, who they indicated might be a person of color. The descriptors for the people and the countries were increasingly vague. Maybe I would have understood more once Azoth got out into the world more, but I'm not sure that I cared enough about any of the characters to worry about it.
There were five main character from whom you get to see the world in this book, at least as far as I read. All of them were men. They were all fairly similar in personality, save the little lord who seemed to be kind of sweet. I didn't particularly latch onto any of them because, again, they seemed like caricatures. It was kind of like reading a D&D campaign where you can tell they have an idea of what their character is like but it isn't fully fleshed out when they started writing.
And let's talk about the fact that Rat, the villain in the first 90 pages, is the only person with interest in more than one gender. And the way that the author chooses to express this interest? Sexual assault. I'm sorry, but when all the other characters are conceivably straight and you make only your villain bisexual, it reads like you think non-straight people are pedophiles and rapists. That may not have been the author's intention, but that's how it came across to me.
The writing style is also not particularly interesting. It's not bad, but it isn't good either. There's no descriptive flair, nothing happens that isn't entirely predictable. It's just... blah.
Obviously, I didn't finish this book. It was 650 pages and at 91 pages, I found I just wasn't interested in forcing myself through the remaining pages. This book came recommended to me by a college friend (I'm sorry Mike!), but I can't pass that recommendation down I'm sorry to say. If you're reading this review and considering reading this book, just keep walking. There are better books.