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dann1188 's review for:

The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman
3.5

This ended up being an enjoyable story full of adventure, action, fairly good characters, and my beloved giants and goblins.

I was hesitant at first, annoyed by the writing-style of pure tell-don't-show; every single thing was explicitly explained so there wasn't an inch of room to figure out even the simplest thing from context. This really made it tricky to follow the pace of each scene at the start, but soon this thankfully dropped for the most part. Otherwise, the prose was okay - I particularly enjoyed how Buehlman wrote his action scenes.

I very much enjoyed much of the worldbuilding once I got to grips with the absolute fuckload of placenames and such dropped immediately.

Ultimately, this was a fun story with short chapters following an interesting cast of characters through a thrilling adventure in a magical world (loved the tattoo stuff btw).

Good - 7/10