Joe Abercrombie

[alitheapipkin]

I'm glad I persevered with Joe Abercrombie books despite being in two minds by the end of the First Law trilogy because I finished reading 'The Heroes' the other night and it's his best book yet. An anti-war war novel with engaging, incredibly human characters. And best of all, he has strong female characters who have agency and achieve things in

Comments

[erindubitably]

I got a couple chapters into one of his books and gave up because it was so relentlessly dark and not one female character had been introduced.

*looks it up*

Yeah, it was the first book of the First law trilogy. Maybe I should skip that and read the other one instead.

[alitheapipkin]

Yeah, the amount of torture in the first one is pretty grim. The 2nd of the trilogy is my favourite of that set but I do prefer the more recent ones by some way to the original trilogy. There still aren't that many female characters though, I shouldn't get your hopes up too much, and they are still very dark, just not full of rape. They are probably still something of an acquired taste - if you couldn't get through the first one at all, I'm not sure they'll have changed enough for you to actually enjoy the later ones. I wouldn't exactly hold him up as a paragon of feminist writing, I just think he's doing a lot better than some people and putting a lie to the idea you can't have grim 'realistic' fantasy without rape.

[alitheapipkin]

Actually, thinking about this some more - try Best Served Cold that has a female main character and is what Kev describes as Abercrombie's 'Dumas' novel - a revenge tale with a twist. If you still can't get on with that then I don't think you'll enjoy any of them. I probably enjoyed The Heroes more but I'm not sure it'll work so well as a starter because a lot of the characters in it are recurring from the earlier novels.

I'm reading Red Country now and his female character tally is improving :)