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

[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.