The Blinding Knife

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.