Nadine K

After a my unfortunate run of unimpressive reads, this finally felt like coming home. I've put off reading this book for a while because I loved the first book so much I didn't want to ruin my memories of it, but those worries were proven to be unfounded. The second instalment to the Gentleman Bastards series is just as fantastic as the first.

A heist story in a fantasy setting done RIGHT.

How Scott Lynch balances intrigue, suspense, drama, and humour so masterfully is beyond me.

The structure, the writing, is all meticulous and effective, but somehow also never fails to be exciting and entertaining (EVERY. SINGLE. LINE.).

Not a second of it was boring. It knew when to be light, when to be heavy, and when to be both.

The dialogue is truly the star of the show, the way these characters swear should be considered an art-form. It's almost poetry.

Word of warning: this man has a way of making you fall in love with characters just to murder them in the most brutal ways. I learned that in the first book and this one just served as an unfriendly reminder.

My last book for age 27 😭.

Beautifully written as always. Ray Bradbury's works always reads poetic and lyrical. Sometimes you forget that this book was published in 1950 but OTHER TIMES you are very reminded.

It's wild how different times were when this book was written. It's wild that this imaginative author could imagine a Martian society a decade before humans first reached space but could not imagine a desegregated US just a handful of years before the first laws against it were put into motion. (Let's be clear this book is very much anti-racist, it just says a lot for the beliefs of the time.) Also, widely America (US) centric, which is another thing I blame on the time it was written.