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.