The Blinding Knife

This is one more of those situations that situates me aside from humanity. People actually liked this book.

I gave it a good try, much more then it deserved. I was lazy and didn't want to find another book to read. It was well written. I was still enamored with the characters described in the previous book, hoping the story would pick up at any moment. It didn't. ~20% in. The book won't get any better, I've seen this pattern before.

Four hours of pure descriptions and mundane tasks. ABSOLUTELY NO PLOT ADVANCEMENT WHATSOEVER, NOTHING INTERESTING HAPPENS. This is why you create a connection with the characters, people will read anything if they liked the characters.

And now for the bad part, it is full of cliches, including some of the worst most despicable ones! Never mind that Gavin is building a city with Kariss, and that takes an huge amount of pages. The book is focusing of Kip's time in the school of wizards. He is bullied because he is different, he is shy around girls, the teachers are mean to him, he has a hard time making friends. Insert any other ‘underdog wizard apprentice school training' here.

Read 4:07/24:12 17%

Oh, I've been reading this book on and off for two and half months. Definitely, not the fastest read out there.
I like the main characters more and more. Well, with some exceptions - I stopped at each Liv's chapter because I just couldn't deal with her. Oh, some plot turns just wanted me to ask why or why would author do that. I still have to come to terms with the ending. I have no idea when I will come back to the series.

3.5 out of 5 stars

The Blinding Knife is certainly better than the first entry in the Lightbringer series – there's less exposition, stronger pacing, and many of the flaws/edges that bugged me in the first book were smoothed over. Unfortunately, these improvements were not enough to make me fall in love with the series. For me, the storylines oscillated between “can't stop reading” and “disinterested to the point of skimming,” with the latter mode being more prevalent as the book went on. I wanted to read all four books before this year's release of the final book, but I think this is where I will leave the series. I can see why people enjoy it, but it's just not for me.

See this review and others at The Speculative Shelf.

I absolutely loved this book. I really think Brent Weeks outdid himself on this one. I was really drawn in and I could feel all the emotions. The one scene that I particularly remember is when Kip had lost his place in the blackguard and Cruxer saves him.

“I've wanted to be a Blackguard since I could walk. I value this brotherhood too highly to let in a man who destroys unity rather than builds it, a man who takes money to destroy one of his own. If the cost to remove him from the Blackguard is that I, too, am expelled, so be it. [...] Aram's the second-best fighter in our class. He took money to finish low. He took money to keep Breaker out.”
Damn that hit hard.

I loved it!

Oh Gavin, the trouble you get yourself into... We see him pushed to new limits and end up in a few hard to escape situations. And oh boy does he know how to trip and fall on his face when it comes to women. And Kip! Wow have you have grown! From a barely known bastard to someone who has potential power and allies. I loved the intense moments we saw as Kip struggled through training. The relationships he formed over the course of this book and the actions that resulted from them were impressive. Though he is hard on himself, you can see all the locked up potential in Kip that I hope to witness unleashed in the next book. Oh and lets not forget Dazen...bat shit crazy Dazen. You are such a character and we see so little of you this time. I wanted more, because most of what we hear of Dazen is in passing from Gavin, but unfortunately we're given small (although yes exciting!) pieces of you. Now a few nit picky things. Personal character thoughts should have been italicized. It was a bit confusing to shift from third person into first randomly when they went into their own thoughts. And I don't see the point for the black cards to have their own little stories. Jumping from main story to side story was confusing and not marked well. I've been told it's important for the next book, but all I wanted to do was skip over them back to the characters I knew. And now a compliment! Finally an author who has a COMPLETE glossary not just a pieced together one with only the most important people or things. Having read the first book over a year ago, the glossary was perfect for a refresher. Though it took me a while to get through, I enjoyed this book and am looking forward to the next.

Executive Summary: A vast improvement over [b:The Black Prism 7165300 The Black Prism (Lightbringer, #1) Brent Weeks https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327921884s/7165300.jpg 7534979]. It still has all the same flaws of the that book, but in far less quantity.Audio book: I read rather than listened to the first book in this series. The fact that [a:Simon Vance 5602 Simon Vance https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1240014151p2/5602.jpg] was the narrator helped push me over the edge on continuing this series after being rather underwhelmed by the first book.As expected, he does an excellent job with a great variety of voices and inflections that just make the story come alive. If you do audio books and want to read this book, I highly recommend going this route.Full ReviewI'm hard pressed to say why I like this book so much better than [b:The Black Prism 7165300 The Black Prism (Lightbringer, #1) Brent Weeks https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327921884s/7165300.jpg 7534979]. It contains all the same elements that drove me nuts in the first book: Cartoonish villains, juvenile wish fulfillment, and stupid and obnoxious characters; albeit in lesser quantities.I think it's a combination of things. I love the magic school trope, and we get a lot of that here, at least to some degree. We also get more of Iron Fist who was probably the only character from the first book I liked the entire time. There is the addition of Teia, who I like a lot despite sharing some of the same annoying characteristics of Karris. However, she's got more of an excuse.You also finally get a lot more explanation of the magic that I found lacking in the first book. There is still a hand waving, but I found myself no longer caring as much.Kip is still obnoxious though. I think this book would be a lot better with a different protagonist. I like the idea of doing a parody of the chosen one trope, and I think it works well for this series. I just wish he did it different somehow. I did find myself much more tolerant of Kip by the end of the book however, but far from liking him.Gavin and Karris are both mostly enjoyable, though some of their parts were pretty eye rolling. Andross Guile makes for an interesting antagonist at times, but is over the top in his actions far too often. At least he's less of a cartoon character than some of the other antagonists.I think that this series is going to be relegated to “guilty pleasure”. I don't find it to be a book that can be held up as excellent as some might, but it is a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to the next book much more than I was looking forward to this one.

I think I can break down how I felt let down by this series into a few areas.

World building - This series was always pitched to me by a brief description of the magic in the world and I picked the series up based on that description. It always went something like this, “the magic in the world is based on the spectrum of visible light, and the Prism is the only man who can use the full spectrum”. That's enough for me to be interested, but not enough to read 1400 pages (across two books) and feel like I understand the world. The magic system in the first book was not explained clearly; and it really didn't help matters when the political system or ruling system was barely explained to boot. This left me feeling like I only knew the bare minimum to get by throughout this book.

Characters - Every character in this book feels like an over exaggerated caricature of some kind of trope or stereotype. I think that could be done well in books which are satirising the traditional epic fantasy tropes, but this series does not seem to be. Gavin is literally a religious icon, he is so gorgeous that every woman he encounters wants to shag/marry/have babies with him. He is smart, beloved and inspired loyalty in the empire that he possibly rules. I say possibly because, as I said in the world building section, the ruling system of this Empire really doesn't make sense. All the women are introduced by their relevance to Gavin's genitals.

Writing - The first book was the worst culprit for this, and the second made an improvement on the writing. However, although I had issues with the Night Angel trilogy, the writing in his debut trilogy was of a better quality than this series. My issues are mostly repetitive sentence structure, strange switches between 1st and 3rd POV and an odd balance between description and plot that didn't work for me.

All in all, a disappointment. I think I will complete the books I already own in this series and then move on from Brent Weeks as an author.

As I approached the end of the first book I was not convinced that I'd read the second. It was fun, its magic system relatively unique, but the overall story just hadn't pulled me in too much; I didn't get a sense of the world, or its inhabitants besides a small few. But the last chapter of the first book, the cliffhanger with the other prism (to avoid spoiling anything), intrigued me. I said, alright, I'll give it one more book. And I'm glad I did, because this one was a lot of fun. The world really filled itself out; the many interwoven plots were fun and constantly intriguing; and now I have to finish this whole long series. I've just gotta know. Sounds like I'll have to wait for the fifth book too.

My one complaint is that this one had a few superfluous and silly sexual encounters – an issue I tend to have with the genre as a whole. I'm sitting in traffic listening to this audiobook when all of a sudden this entirely unnecessary sex scene or a few paragraphs about breasts interrupt the flow of the story. I'm no prude, but I don't really read for titillation, and when it does so little for the story especially, it just undermines my enjoyment of a book. Thankfully these little interludes were a small fraction of the book.

I've already bought the third.