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A review by erebusc
The Grey Bastards by Jonathan French
4.0
So I had heard a lot about this book from Reddit, Youtube and just general word of mouth, so when I saw that it was at my local waterstones I just had to pick it up.
The Grey Bastards is essentially about how the world would look like when society has to deal with Orcs and what to do after they have rampaged across human towns. This leads us to a look at a society with half orc - half humans that are essentially utilised as the orc killing squad. Now, in this story they are not necessarily as organised as that but imagine Sons Of Anarchy biker gangs, where the gangs are different groupings of half orcs riding massive hogs that are tasked at ensuring no orcs stay on their turf.
That is essentially how this story feels to me and it works extremely well, it is grim, but also has a good sense of humour and it stays away from a lot of the grim dark stereotypes that you may expect. All of the graphic violence and sex scenes are well written, and did not make me outworldy cringe when it came up. There are notes of sexual violence but this book strikes a fine line of "this is just how the world is" without being graphic about it or trying to show off some strange fetish that some authors shoe horn in.
The main characters of this novel are well written, you get a great understanding of the key characters, even while only getting one POV, that of Jackal. I really enjoyed his character, his insights to the world and other members of his group and the way he handles situations. Thankfully, the author doesn't go out of his way to make him seem stupid, just a bit naive and a bit too impulsive which really works well.
I do not have a lot of gripes with the book, but the main issue I had with it was solely due to the pacing of the story. At times it felt like the story didn't want to have a lull, it needed something to happen to push the pace. It didn't want you to think about the story, what has happened or really think about all the world building. It wanted to continue to describe things, show you new plot elements or characters and wanted to get on with it. This can be a great thing but in the first of a trilogy, I think it would have benefitted in letting the reader enjoy the world and get to grips with certain things before quickly rushing on.
The Grey Bastards is essentially about how the world would look like when society has to deal with Orcs and what to do after they have rampaged across human towns. This leads us to a look at a society with half orc - half humans that are essentially utilised as the orc killing squad. Now, in this story they are not necessarily as organised as that but imagine Sons Of Anarchy biker gangs, where the gangs are different groupings of half orcs riding massive hogs that are tasked at ensuring no orcs stay on their turf.
That is essentially how this story feels to me and it works extremely well, it is grim, but also has a good sense of humour and it stays away from a lot of the grim dark stereotypes that you may expect. All of the graphic violence and sex scenes are well written, and did not make me outworldy cringe when it came up. There are notes of sexual violence but this book strikes a fine line of "this is just how the world is" without being graphic about it or trying to show off some strange fetish that some authors shoe horn in.
The main characters of this novel are well written, you get a great understanding of the key characters, even while only getting one POV, that of Jackal. I really enjoyed his character, his insights to the world and other members of his group and the way he handles situations. Thankfully, the author doesn't go out of his way to make him seem stupid, just a bit naive and a bit too impulsive which really works well.
I do not have a lot of gripes with the book, but the main issue I had with it was solely due to the pacing of the story. At times it felt like the story didn't want to have a lull, it needed something to happen to push the pace. It didn't want you to think about the story, what has happened or really think about all the world building. It wanted to continue to describe things, show you new plot elements or characters and wanted to get on with it. This can be a great thing but in the first of a trilogy, I think it would have benefitted in letting the reader enjoy the world and get to grips with certain things before quickly rushing on.