Red Seas Under Red Skies

Paperback, 628 Pages
Adult/ Epic Fantasy
By: Scott Lynch
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/4

“When you can’t cheat the game, you’d best find a means to cheat the players.”

The Lies of Locke Lamora was one of my top reads last year and one of my favorite reads of all time. I didn’t want to jump into book two immediately because I wanted to savor it as much as possible as the series is still ongoing and has been for more than a decade. I chose Locke Lamora as my book #800 and gave the honor again for Red Seas Under Red Skies as book #900 and that shows how much I enjoyed book one.

The general consensus is that book two is great but less good than book one and I totally agree. That being said, book one got 5 stars from me, book two got 4.25 which is still higher than like 80-90% of the books I read.

To be honest, there was another reason why I procrastinated reading this one which is the nautical aspect I expected from the title. I am not a big fan of fantasy novels taking place on ships and seas. The first ~30% of the book had a very similar feeling to book one and I loved that part. Then they had a nautical adventure indeed which was not bad at all and I did enjoy it but it became a bit stagnant in the middle.

There are new secondary characters here but Lamora’s “family” in book one was more interesting. Lamora and Jean and their interactions are still very well written though.

The plot is convoluted as in book one and in a very good way, there is a main objective but to achieve that there are more objectives and suddenly everything is entangled and complicated and that makes the resolution very intriguing to follow.

“Any man can fart in a closed room and say that he commands the wind”

Summary: This was a bit less good than book one, but it was still a great read. I am savoring those books and reading them slowly as I know it will be years before we get the next books, but I will be reading book three for sure.