Joe Abercrombie's "Best Served Cold"

"Sometimes you must take one life to spare more, and when those times come, sentiment helps nobody." - Shenkt

Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold - I just finished reading Best Served Cold, after hearing so many good things about this young fantasy author, Abercrombie. I thought the book was pretty decent, it is a fun and gritty fantasy novel. The plot is essentially a "Kill Bill" set in a medieval Italy like setting. Quite interesting and a bit different from other fantasies I've read. I was expecting a violent and graphic novel and it was. It has lots of fights, bad ass characters and even weird sex. It may sound like too much, but it is written almost in a comical way, so even though the scenes aren't often funny, Abercrombie manages to make it sound funny in a very dark and twisted way (at least for me), which was good, even if it eventually got old. The book is fairly long and the "humor" didn't work the whole way through, but that might have just been me.

One criticism I have with the book though is the fact that I didn't necessarily care about any of the characters. Not to say that there weren't interesting characters in the book, but no one was good enough that I cared whether I would see him at the end or not. So much so that my favorite character didn't survive the story and I didn't necessarily care too much.

I'm definitely considering Abercrombie's First Law trilogy at some point. I've heard good things about it, and it takes place in the same world as this novel, so that could be fun.

Overall, it's worth a read if you want to read something fun and violent. I'll give it a 7.0