Scan barcode
A review by brigantes
The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie
5.0
Back in the North and my goodness it almost feels like a homecoming. Unpredictable hillmen, volatile Northerners, posturing Union officers, incompetent leadership, infighting, competition, mistrust, and a lot of dead men. It's a book about a battle, after all.
Sometimes a chapter would follow a thread through a single engagement, working from one side of the battlefield to the other, jumping between Union soldiers and Northmen, some who had already made appearances in the normal POV chapters, some whose entire The Heroes appearance was the sum of a few paragraphs; following the chain of POV from the killed to their killer, who then takes the former role themselves, on and on. It makes for a breathless, adrenaline-filled experience as you're whisked around the fighting and allows the reader a look at different aspects of the battle and snippets of cultural context without having to make dozens of full POV characters in the vein of Gorst or Craw. Never quite read world-building done like this and it's great.
For each of the three days of the battle, the book presents you with an updated map of the valley showing everyone's new positions, which was really helpful to refresh my memory rather than having to flip back to the front all the time!!
How Joe Abercrombie can make such unlikeable people so entertaining to read about, I don't know. And honestly, even then, he writes them in such a compelling way I do end up rather liking most of them anyway despite myself.
It's great to see JA improving and developing as a writer as I work through his oeuvre. My heart was in my throat more than once reating this. I genuinely do think the First Law standalones are even better than the original trilogy. Each book I read by him is better than the last - no mean feat
Sometimes a chapter would follow a thread through a single engagement, working from one side of the battlefield to the other, jumping between Union soldiers and Northmen, some who had already made appearances in the normal POV chapters, some whose entire The Heroes appearance was the sum of a few paragraphs; following the chain of POV from the killed to their killer, who then takes the former role themselves, on and on. It makes for a breathless, adrenaline-filled experience as you're whisked around the fighting and allows the reader a look at different aspects of the battle and snippets of cultural context without having to make dozens of full POV characters in the vein of Gorst or Craw. Never quite read world-building done like this and it's great.
For each of the three days of the battle, the book presents you with an updated map of the valley showing everyone's new positions, which was really helpful to refresh my memory rather than having to flip back to the front all the time!!
How Joe Abercrombie can make such unlikeable people so entertaining to read about, I don't know. And honestly, even then, he writes them in such a compelling way I do end up rather liking most of them anyway despite myself.
It's great to see JA improving and developing as a writer as I work through his oeuvre. My heart was in my throat more than once reating this. I genuinely do think the First Law standalones are even better than the original trilogy. Each book I read by him is better than the last - no mean feat