The Blinding Knife by Brent Weeks

With 50,000 refugees, a bastard son, and an ex-fiance who may have learned his darkest secret, Gavin has problems on every side. All magic in the world is running wild and threatens to destroy the Seven Satrapies.

Oh, I've been reading this book on and off for two and half months. Definitely, not the fastest read out there.
I like the main characters more and more. Well, with some exceptions - I stopped at each Liv's chapter because I just couldn't deal with her. Oh, some plot turns just wanted me to ask why or why would author do that. I still have to come to terms with the ending. I have no idea when I will come back to the series.

Screams for the foreseeable future.

I love this book and this series! I love these characters except of course the ones I hate, but I don't think I'm supposed to love them so it's cool.

I'm losing it over that ending

3.5 out of 5 stars

The Blinding Knife is certainly better than the first entry in the Lightbringer series – there's less exposition, stronger pacing, and many of the flaws/edges that bugged me in the first book were smoothed over. Unfortunately, these improvements were not enough to make me fall in love with the series. For me, the storylines oscillated between “can't stop reading” and “disinterested to the point of skimming,” with the latter mode being more prevalent as the book went on. I wanted to read all four books before this year's release of the final book, but I think this is where I will leave the series. I can see why people enjoy it, but it's just not for me.

See this review and others at The Speculative Shelf.

This is one more of those situations that situates me aside from humanity. People actually liked this book.

I gave it a good try, much more then it deserved. I was lazy and didn't want to find another book to read. It was well written. I was still enamored with the characters described in the previous book, hoping the story would pick up at any moment. It didn't. ~20% in. The book won't get any better, I've seen this pattern before.

Four hours of pure descriptions and mundane tasks. ABSOLUTELY NO PLOT ADVANCEMENT WHATSOEVER, NOTHING INTERESTING HAPPENS. This is why you create a connection with the characters, people will read anything if they liked the characters.

And now for the bad part, it is full of cliches, including some of the worst most despicable ones! Never mind that Gavin is building a city with Kariss, and that takes an huge amount of pages. The book is focusing of Kip's time in the school of wizards. He is bullied because he is different, he is shy around girls, the teachers are mean to him, he has a hard time making friends. Insert any other ‘underdog wizard apprentice school training' here.

Read 4:07/24:12 17%