A review by peterkeep
Half a War by Joe Abercrombie

5.0

There it is. The conclusion. Abercrombie writes nice endings. I really loved the ending of his First Law trilogy, and he's done a nice job wrapping up his standalone books from the same world, and he does a nice job here. More new main characters that are easy to root for, that refresh the story, and that add some interesting perspective. The old ones are still around, and even though we don't follow them specifically, it's still easy to see what they're up to, and to kind of "finish" their story ourselves by filling in the blanks.

I really do love the fact that Abercrombie doesn't change how he writes for this series. It's YA, but it's still the same author as the First Law series and related books. He has the same kind of literary tricks (I fell for the

Spoiler

love scene that I expected, but wait, the characters aren't who I thought they were!

trick that he's done before, for instance) and tone. He uses character catch phrases that instead of feeling cliche, add a lot of depth to the characters quickly. There is a lot of internal struggle (although it's not angsty) and characters missing opportunites to go along with the regular backstabbing bastards that he's so good at writing.

I wrote this in the review of [b: Half a King|18666047|Half a King (Shattered Sea, #1)|Joe Abercrombie|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1389378321s/18666047.jpg|25641726], but I'll say it again: he doesn't water these books down even though they're marketed as YA.

There were some heavy-handed messages, with his philosophy on the "elves" being not very subtle at all, but that's fine. He writes a lot about what it means to be human, and showing his hand a bit more than usual isn't a bad thing.

Anyways, here's the easiest summary I can think of: I've read 9 books by Joe Abercrombie, and I haven't found one that I didn't like.