Once again this was an audiobook but I actually got a signed hardcopy as a gift (awesome gift!) and it turns out the new POV character's chapters were in a different font, which I thought was really cool!
Anyway!
Continue Reading...
Anyway!
As per usual Mark Lawrence does a wonderful job of throwing
us right into the action and then folding in the back-story like a fine cake
made of blood, death, and misery. This time we join Jorg as he is about to make
his way to Congression (I’m not sure if that’s supposed to the capitalised but
why not?) and again some backstory woven in that adds wonderful depth to the
world, story, and character.
A brand new twist on this book in particular in another POV
character! Say what!
This time we hear from … Chella’s perspective (Sorry I had
to look that up, fantasy audiobooks mean I’m not sure how to spell things
sometimes). It’s an interesting tale and gives us much more information about the
world and a fresh perspective on things (although definitely not a fluffy happy
one).
If there’s something that Lawrence can do, it is weave different levels of stories together. We also get lots of those throwaway sentences that Lawrence is so good at which are just beautifully put together and just make you stop to appreciate them.
One thing I was slightly confused about was the
foreshadowing that Lawrence included in his book. Don’t get me wrong, I love a
bit of foreshadowing, especially if it means your second read through is
completely different. I’m not sure if I
felt the foreshadowing was obvious, because it wasn’t very heavy handed at all,
or perhaps more that Lawrence’s writing process is more of a (to use a term
made famous by GRRM) gardener than an architect. Whatever the cause, reason, or
rhyme I did find that I had seen ahead the twist long before it happened.
I don’t want you to take away that this is necessarily a bad
thing, I’m not sure if it was supposed to remain a mystery until the big reveal
or if Lawrence wanted us to guess it early on. With the story being in first
person (for the most part) it added a tremendous amount of dramatic tension to
the final chapters of the book and made those scenes all the more powerful.
All in all this book was a very good close to the Broken
Empire trilogy and I very much look forward to reading the next series that
Lawrence has lined up for us (especially if he takes us beyond the end of
Emperor of Thorns in his world's timeline to see what effects the finale had on
it).
This was an excellent book of the same high calibre that
Mark Lawrence has crafted before. In Jorg we get a philosopher, warrior, king,
and broken thing. Mark Lawrence makes no apologies for Jorg but we don’t want
to and we fall in love with him all the same (perhaps more so because of that).
The story moves a little slower than the previous books but it is still quick
and compelling. It will make you laugh, it will tear at you and make you cry
and leave you wanting more stories from Lawrence’s world.
What more could you want?
