Half a King

My first Abercrombie and I found it compulsively readable. Plot-wise, it's not terribly original but the story is very entertaining in a light-hearted yet dark sort of way. I cannot help but favorably compare this to Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora. Thematically, the books are very similar; post-apocalyptic medieval setting; young protagonist coming of age under adversity; violence interspersed with humor; adventure, adventure, adventure! Abercrombie weaves a slightly tighter narrative in my opinion and also does a better job of balancing the violence and humor. The bloodletting is not dwelt upon quite as much and the humor is less forced. Instead, Abercrombie does a great job of developing his characters and laying out a decent plot with a few twists that are, for the most part, not too hard to spot. Even though the plot 'twists' were mostly easy to see coming, the journey getting there was the fun part. Listed at 352 pages, I knocked this out in two sittings as it 'felt' about 150 pages shorter than that.