The Blacktongue Thief

I was looking for great Grimdark fantasy, and boy does The Blacktongue Thief deliver. As a single-person POV, the novel revolves around Kinch's personality and narrative style. He's clever in the worldly sense, but also with the way he phrases words and explains concepts. Combined with an imaginative medieval fantasy world that has seen humanity brought to its knees by goblins and giants, this novel has put Christopher Buehlman high on my list of authors to follow.

The worldbuilding in this is fantastic - with a lot of time spent fleshing out both internal and external concepts. The Thief's guild that Kinch belongs to is elaborately sketched out, and how he (and it) interacts with the world lets you see the internal workings of the human lands as well as the general technology of the times, but also the exceptional things like magic and lost artifacts. Galva receives an equal amount of backstory, which is good because it would have been so easy for most authors to write a badass swordswoman and call it a day. But in addition to tying her historically to the goblins, the creative handmaiden of death religion comes up often and reminds me how truly different this world is.

And then there's the goblins and giants. The antagonists are different... alien even. They are described in detail such that you really fear them for how different they are from humanity, and then we get a dose of realism in terms of politics and how human nations would deal with having borders with such creatures. It's brutal and grim.

In case it's not obvious, I'm in love with this book. The worst part is that there's no follow up as of the writing of this review.

Highly recommended.

I really want to like fantasy as a genre, but these books are too damn long.

Hit a bit of a reading slump through this one, and I do think the length played a part; I didn't push myself to read as quickly as I normally do because I knew it was always going to take me longer to finish this one, so why rush? Which is a shame, because the prose is written well, the dialogue flowed naturally and I was getting pretty invested in the worldbuilding that was introduced at all the right parts and in the right amounts. But I can't ignore the fact that whenever I picked this book up to pick up where I left off I had a sense of... I think resignation is too strong of a word, but the fact that I considered it should be telling on its own.

It was a funny-yet-serious book with memorable scenes and that wrapped up neatly while still allowing for an obvious segue into a sequel (which has not yet been written at the time of this review). I just wish that maybe a quarter or even a third of this book was taken out to slim it down, particularly the bits where a Chekov's Gun scenario is clearly being set up to go off later (which happened a few times).

"The thing about a crown though -- if you lay it down too long, someone else'll pick it up."

This book was such a fun read in a genre that's been kind of a letdown for me in recent years. After giving this the cautious "is this another YA fantasy" sniff test, I can tell you this is decidedly not a YA fantasy book, and if you like dark, gritty fantasy with a healthy layer of gallows humor along the way, this would probably be up your alley as well.

A down-on-his-luck thief (er, Taker) named Kinch Na Shannack is just trying to scrape enough cash together to pay back his debts when he runs into Galva, a knight on a quest to save a queen, on the road. He gets swept up in guild politics, gets sent on a secret quest to follow Galva, and has a host of misadventures along the way. Oh, and there's a cat. Don't forget Bully Boy. Rao.

There's lots, lots of worldbuilding in this book, from different races, different languages, different sayings, phrases, mannerisms, and a whole host of historical events and god/goddess stories. I never felt bogged down in any of it either, which I sometimes do when you're beat over the head with infodumps of lore in some books. There's also quite a bit of irreverent humor since this book is from the point of view of a thief, but not so much that it feels like you're going from quippy one-liner to quippy one-liner. Finally, there's some interesting magic here involving tattoos that I thought was a neat touch. And war crows.

I guess if I had to put my finger on why this isn't a 5-star book (because I really enjoyed this one), I think it's because there's very little change in the characters along the way. Things feel a little flat to me when there's no character development, and who these guys are at the beginning of the book is exactly who they are at the end of it. So while the entire thing felt an inch deep in terms of depth, the worldbuilding, humor, and overall style of the book made it a mile wide and incredibly engaging.

Highly recommend this one if you're looking for a little something different in the fantasy genre today, a little something grimdark, a little something gallows humor.