Premise:
Locke Lamora and his gang, the Gentleman Bastards, spend their days pretending to be lowly common thieves, even managing to fool Capa Barsavi, the kingpin of the gangs of Camorr, all the while swindling the nobles out of vast sums of money. Then they become entangled in the mysterious Gray King’s vengeful ambitions, and the life they’ve known is turned upside down.

Thoughts:
In one word?

Whoa.

If that seems ambiguous, rest assured, it’s meant to be.

On one hand we have an intricately crafted tale, fast-paced, compelling, thoroughly engaging. I zoomed though the 700+ pages in a week, pretty damned good, given my current time constraints. The setting is fully realized, gritty and labyrinthine, stunningly detailed. The back story is handled well; not in the most original way, but the juxtaposition between Locke’s rise as a thief and con artist and his current storyline was well-paced for both my microscopic attention span and as a vehicle for suspense.

On the other had, the author is clearly not afraid to color his narrative with a plethora of gory details, from squick-inducing torture scenes to people being drowned in casks of horse urine.

Eek.

If gross details don’t bother you, then you won’t have a problem. But as a warning, Scott Lynch isn’t afraid to kill off people either, though it was pretty easy for me to tell who was going to bite it. While stories of Locke and Jean were interspersed throughout the book, the others were barely touched on, and their deaths, for the most part, happened off-screen. Not the best way to get a reaction. I’m not complaining, though. I prefer to know who dies, and everyone knows I don’t care about spoilers.

I was really happy to see the huge amount of detail on the setting. The city of Camorr is inspired by Venice, with the Italian feel of the language and the canals, but it’s enhanced by an otherworldly architectural element that is just so cool and mysterious. The author goes on in great detail in exposition chapters, on descriptions and history, sometimes a little too much detail. There were a couple of times where I was like, get on with the story already! But I’m pretty nerdy, and learning about the city was interesting for the most part. I do question the device of setting up such a vivid picture of the setting, only to have the main characters forced out at the end. I can see the story coming back to Camorr later, but with volumes of such size (did I mention 700+ pages?) it might be hard for the readers to remember pertinent details in between.

Other than that, this was a great story, twisty in all the right angles, cleverly put together, characters who are unabashedly criminal, but not unsympathetic. I love a good thief story.

Rating: Ripping Good Yarn
I’ve added another category to my rating system. This will go between Good Read and Sparkling With Book Magic. The aforementioned gore kept this one out of the Sparkling category, but I enjoyed it far more than most of the books in the Good Read slot, so I feel justified.

Influences:
I was glad to see a commercially successful book with a back story device similar to mine; now I know it can be done well, in spite of the frequent use of the phrase ‘info dump’ in the review communities I frequent. However, concision will factor prominently in the revision process.

Coming up: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones and His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novic. I feel so fortunate in my reading choices lately! These were both awesome.