Jhereg by Steven Brust

[lightreads]

Jhereg by Steven Brust

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Assassin nonsense in a fantasy land where death is generally not final and humans are the minority.

Yeah, I know everyone loves these books, but did you love the first one? Because I thought this was inoffensive but also uninteresting, and there was this overbaked convolution to the whole thing that made me think I ought to be reading it out of the super sekrit writing notebooks of a high school kid who plays a lot of D&D. Not like there’s anything wrong with D&D, just, you know. Random reincarnation plotline wtf?

To be fair, this was my hurricane book, and yeah, my sense of humor was elsewhere for a few days there (apparently it runs on electricity, I didn’t know). But yeah. Not funny.




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Comments

[hamsterwoman]

I've been flailing over this series for two years and making puppy eyes at my f-list to read it and so on, but it's always with the caveat that I'm not sure these books work for everyone (and I haven't figured out what makes them click), and also it might be something of an acquired taste.

I was intrigued enough by the first one (which I read years and years ago) to keep reading whenever I came across them, and occasionally even rereading my favorite, Taltos (#4 in publication order, but the first in Vlad's personal chronology), and then suddenly I hit critical mass around my eighth book or so and it blossomed into obsession/love.

I do think the things that make this series really neat emerge over the course of multiple books -- character arc and history revelations, additional interesting bits of worldbuilding, and the way Brust keeps trying new things. So, really, I love a couple of the books in the series, but it's the progression as a whole that I respect and find really cool. But whether or not it's worth investing the time to get to the point of being able to survey the whole thing would definitely depend on how much one is enjoying the journey, I would think, so if Jhereg came across as neither funny nor interesting, it might not be.

Or, if you want to give the series another shot (sorry, couldn't tell from your question about if everyone loved the first one whether you were trying to decide whether to keep trying with the series or just looking to compare impressions) -- Taltos, the one that's first chronologically, might be another good starting point. Especially as Yendi, #2 in publication order, is pretty much all overbaked convolution (as that's what Yendi do), and also Brust's least favorite of his novels, IIRC.

[lightreads]

Very belatedly -- thanks. The things I tend to love about series fiction are the exact things you like about these books, so yeah, I'll probably pick up a few more of them someday.

[ellen_fremedon]

I don't start liking Vlad until he starts growing up, which for me happens in Teckla; but I do like Teckla and everything set after it.

And it is very much young Vlad, not early Brust, that I have issues with. I've been reading the series in publication order, not internal chronological order (though Brust plays enough games with flashback to make reading in chronological order a challenge), and while Brust's writing does improve as the series goes on, I don't like the later-written books set before Teckla that much either. (Though they both have saving graces-- Taltos introduces a lot of worldbuilding, and Dragon gives some clues about the in-world provenance of the novels as texts.)

Brust tries a lot of things in this series-- different genres, different structural tricks, different viewpoints-- and that makes the series hit-or-miss for a lot of readers. But they're fast reads, and I find that enough of them do something I'm interested in to make it worthwhile to keep reading.

(FWIW, my favorites are Teckla, Phoenix, Orca, Athyra, Issola, and Jhegaala. Also the food porn parts of Dzur, though I don't even remember what the actual plot was in that one; I skimmed all the story because I wanted to get back to the menus.)

[readerjane]

I've been meaning to read this for years, and never got around to it. Neither my own library nor the next town over has got it, not an excuse at all anymore now that e-resources are so ubiquitous. Maybe this year.

[malka]

I kind of think of these books as the adult equivalent of the Babysitter's Club books. They're light and pleasant to read, without making you think much or leaving you with any particular memories. You can skip around in the series almost at whim and it doesn't matter much. Other than Brust's coffee fixation and the lack of the BSC's chapter 2 intros, they feel very similar to me.

(Then again, it took me a very long time to realize that I should be translating Dragaereans as elves instead of as dragon-people, and I've never quite gotten over that.)

[lightreads]

First off, lol, but secondly,


(Then again, it took me a very long time to realize that I should be translating Dragaereans as elves instead of as dragon-people, and I've never quite gotten over that.)




Okay, thank you. I basically cast them as dragon people the entire time even though I knew I wasn't supposed to.

[eagle]

I thought the first book was one of the weaker of the series. It is, as you say, inoffensive, but I didn't think the series started getting good until book four (Taltos), and nine through twelve were the most reliably good.

I've never felt like the books were intended to be that funny. Witty, yes, but not really funny. Usually what's happening, particularly later on in the series, is quite serious.

The world is a delicious pile of nonsense, which Brust starts sorting out into something that sort of vaguely makes sense as he goes along. Jhereg is in some sense a sneak preview of the world-building material of the next five or so books. Almost everything that comes up in it is explored in much more depth and more coherently later on.