BreakRaven

I'd honestly expected more.

I can see why people like the book - I really can. Sometimes I enjoyed the characters, sometimes I enjoyed Lynch's writing, sometimes I liked reading about Locke's antics.

I just.....most of the book irritated me. The world that Lynch built was awesome, but his way of building it was so clumsy. At first I liked the interludes, where it showed me scenes from Locke's youth and evolved him as a character. But then it kind of.....seemed like the author wanted to keep adding interludes, but wasn't sure what he could put in them. (Obviously if he'd added more of young Locke's history, he'd have had to have Sabetha in it. And he adamantly refused to introduce the most interesting-sounding character, so he couldn't have that.)

Anyway. The interludes were pointless. They told me legends and history and stuff about the world that I would have loved to read, say, from a character's narrative or blended in with the actual plot? But instead, the author separated them and just dumped them in the middle of nowhere. It felt terribly disjointed.

Also, there was just too much language. I'm serious. Every single page of the book had at least two expletives on it, and usually ten or twelve. I can handle foul language, but I respect authors who can get through a book without forcing in so much of it. Locke gets angry, so he swears a lot. He's excited, so he swears a lot. Lynch used excessive cursing as a way to show that his characters were emotional or stubborn, and then he also used a lot of it for no reason at all.

These guys are thieves, used to dark alleyways and coarse company - I understand that. But I don't think all the vile language was necessary for the plot, characters, writing - anything.

Another problem I have with the book is actually its character cast. The only main women were Vorchenza, who was barely in the book at all; Sofia, who didn't have much of a personality; the twin sisters, who had about thee lines apiece; and Nazca, who was awesome for twenty pages and then never spoke again. Other than that, the characters were all men, and that made for a lot of macho arguing and posturing, which was annoying to me. I'd have liked to see at least one female character stick around.

Oh, and a lot of the book was just gross. Too much gore, too much discussion of bodily functions, too much detail into little things like the way the poor people in the Cauldron lived. Those were facts I really didn't have to know.

The plot was obvious right from the start. I had everything figured out eighty pages before Locke or anyone else had guessed the meaning of the first clue. Like when the Grey King told Locke that he was tired of living the way he did? That told me that he meant to use Locke to fake his own death - but Locke actually believed that the Grey King just wanted to make a deal, and he believed that the Grey King intended to let him live afterward. Locke was a complete moron through half the book, and the other half his intelligence was average. It was frustrating when I would analyze a problem and come up with the solution, and then spend twenty pages yelling at him before he'd figure out what I did.

Anyway. It's not a terrible book, I just don't like it personally. If I read the next one it'll be a long time in the future.