The Blade Itself

Revisiting this series for the first time was fun. The characters are what brought me back to this series. Abercrombie has a great way of introducing a character as a trope or caricature and then slowly adding more depth. He seems to want to try and balance all his characters just at the point where you can both love then and hate them; then continue to add more and more complications to the character. Whether it works will be up to the reader but there are enough POV's that the book has a good chance to grab you.

I am more neutral on the worldbuilding. I really like the trope of people powerful enough that their personal squabbles have become myths and twisted through time. The Magi really embody this, with every past slight having been magnified over the years. I did not really like the five continents setup each with one culture. It is walked back some as the people in each region are shown to have differences but still not my favorite setup and just felt really artificial. Obviously there is a reason for that but that is not known at the start the book and even after the reveal feels a bit clunky.

While the character interactions are great, the book is very much a setup for the rest of the series rather then standing on its own. Not necessarily a bad thing but for a long book it would have been nice to have a stronger plot for this book. The POV's that have more to do, Glokta and Dogman, are the more interesting stories to follow. The Bayaz plotline POV's suffer from the characters not having much agency and just following along not knowing what is going on. This is less severe on a reread as a lot of foreshadowing and ironic statements are made but on a first read-through it could be frustrating. Of all the POV's Ferro, is probably the most short changed she is introduced late and not given much of anything to do or characters to interact with until the last third. On the use of torture in the book; it is obviously used a lot and is mainly seen to be used to get people to confess to some made up charges. Though it is shown that the info extracted was useful and true. It is a bit easier to believe when the people are almost comically guilty. It doesn't really show the Glokta getting false information, dead ends or picking up innocent people. I think I'll keep an eye on how often torture "works perfectly" in the series as I continue my read.