Red Country Review

E-Book, 465 Pages
Adult/ Fantasy/ Western
By: Joe Abercrombie
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟 1/2

“Strange, how the best moments of our lives we scarcely notice except in looking back.”

Best Served Cold ★★★★ 1/2
The Heroes ★★★
Red Country ★★★ 1/2

As you can see from the above ratings, Red Country was somewhere in the middle between The Heroes and Best Served Cold. For now BSC will hold its place as my favorite Abercrombie book!!

This is more like BSC in the way it is told because Shy who is the Protagonist is trying to search for her siblings. Her step father Lamb is with her in this journey. On the other hand we have Cosca and his group trying to get richer.

The writing is good because it is Abercrombie and I am no stranger to his writing. I love how he mixes humor, banter and serious quote in a mix that works very well. I also love how his characters have key phrases which is realistic and I think more authors should be doing that! On the other hand, I think it was too long for no good reason and I found myself bored in the last 15% or so. I was checking how many minutes I have to read with my kindle and I was kind of detached. Also throughout the book, there were moments that really pulled me in and moments that bored me out and I was thinking of everything but the book.

The characters are great and Abercrombie is a master when it comes to that. Lamb was my favorite and I have to embarrassingly admit that it took me more time than it should have done to know he is. Shy is a cool addition to the world and there are characters we already know that keeps improving just like Shivers. I liked Cosca in BSC much more than in this book because he was like central to the story but then we leave his narrative for a good chunk of pages before coming back to them.

“The trouble with running is wherever you run to, there you are.”

The pacing was kind of weird, as I said previously, some parts were more interesting than the others which affected my perception of the pacing. I felt it was fast sometimes and slow other times.

The world-building was something I am afraid of because I am not a fan of Western stories, something I dreaded before reading the second era of Mistborn before realizing I should have trusted Sanderson and I can say the same about Abercrombie, I had no problem with the western settings and it felt like a real extension of his world that we know so I respect that!

“Better to have steel to hand and find no trouble than find yourself in trouble with no steel to hand.”

Summary: I think overall it was an average book with the usual great writing and characters. I think the plot and pacing were not interesting for me at more than one point and that the book kept going on more than it should have. Anyway, I am closer to the Age of Madness Trilogy so I regret nothing!