The Emperor's Blades

This was not the book I was expected, and I thoroughly enjoyed it anyway. Marketed as epic fantasy that perhaps fans of GRR Martin may like, instead I got YA fantasy with an author unafraid to kill his sympathetic characters (that's where the Martin comparison comes in). I'm ok with that.

The YA feel comes from the two teenage brothers doing the classic YA fantasy trope: one goes off in his teens to become as ass-kicking ‘knight' and learns about himself through discipline and killing, and the other is sent off in his teens to become a ‘mage' and learns about himself through discipline and ‘magic', although in this case it's eastern meditation philosophy. A third POV of their sister, the woman doing a man's job in a man's world, sometimes cuts in, but it's mainly about these boys.

The first three quarters of the book follows the standard pattern of the scrapes YA protags get into in their schooling, but then at pretty much 75% the shit hits the fan and doesn't stop until beyond the end - written as a trilogy the story doesn't end on a cliffhanger so much as a ‘the next chapter won't be out until 2015'. I'm looking forward to it.