jayl 's review for:

Half the World by Joe Abercrombie

3.0

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I do enjoy a good political intrigue, but I'm not much of an enjoyer of travelogues. As such, the first book in this series was a solid half-half for me (ahem). However, Half the World relegates Yarvi, the first book's cunning protagonist, to side-character duty, and introduces two fresh and wholly uninteresting teenagers as new leads. There's still some political intrigue, and Abercrombie is just as good as always at writing realistic characters with excellent dialogue. But the fact remains that there is a lot of traveling, a lot of tiring adolescence, and not a lot of plot to this book for my taste. It also doesn't help that the reader sees the main 'twist' (not really a twist, just an inevitable convergence point for the plot lines) coming from about Chapter 3.

In my estimation this has been the weakest Abercrombie book I've read so far. The fact that it's still a decent and mostly entertaining read speaks to the credit of the author.