Half a War

By: Joe Abercrombie

Narrated by: John Keating

Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins

Publisher's summary

Princess Skara has seen all she loved made blood and ashes. She is left with only words. But the right words can be as deadly as any blade. She must conquer her fears and sharpen her wits to a lethal edge if she is to reclaim her birthright. Only half a war is fought with swords. The deep-cunning Father Yarvi has walked a long road from crippled slave to king's minister. He has made allies of old foes and stitched together an uneasy peace. But now the ruthless Grandmother Wexen has raised the greatest army since the elves made war on God and put Bright Yilling at its head - a man who worships no god but Death. Sometimes one must fight evil with evil. Some - like Thorn Bathu and the sword-bearer Raith - are born to fight, perhaps to die. Others - like Brand the smith and Koll the woodcarver - would rather stand in the light. But when Mother War spreads her iron wings, she may cast the whole Shattered Sea into darkness.

©2015 Joe Abercrombie (P)2015 Recorded Books

2nd book was the highlight

1st book was not bad, second book was fantastic, this third book felt better than the first, but finished mediocre.

Excellently written and performed!

When it Abercrombie and Audible I'm a Steven Pacey fan, that being said, Keating is up there with him, but you have to slow him down in the settings a bit. Awesome series! First Law still rules.

Wrapped up trilogy nicely.

m m m nn m nn j jn j jn j jb just have b

A fitting end to this series

A good conclusion to the series.
This series in general however, has just lacked a little of the wit and humor of earlier books. For instance the treacherous but inept and ultimately Darwin-award-destined poisoner Castor from Best Served Cold. Those awkwardly funny, painfully described fumbling sex scenes.
The plots and twists were there but just missing that extra spice.

it's okay

took awhile to read through despite only being 12 hrs. but it will kill some time.

Good but...

I'll keep this to very minor spoilers.

I read the first two books, and listened to the third, and I must say I'm not thrilled with Keatings performance, He is a very dignified reader which works well when talking about the affairs of court and sinister plots, but his tone doesn't change much for action scenes, and I felt like his dialog lacked emotion. He gets stuck on voices so that often times in conversations, one character's voice will start to sound like the other.

While it's well written, I felt like too much of the plot happened "off screen", and conversely often times in order to make the plot work, Abercrombie has to gloss over details, pretending that nothing happened "off screen." When you combine these two issues together things start to get sloppy.

This is a very light spoiler but, one of the characters changes personalities to sort of fill the void of another who died. This might make sense if they had spent any time together, but they didn't so it comes off as forced.

That and what we learn about the elves in this book seems contradictory to what we learned in the last book, like he changed his mind between writing them,

But it is a fun, well paced, action fantasy with a lot of likable characters, so despite my complaints I still recommend it, though if you don't mind reading, I'd suggest print form over the audio book.

Wish I Had Known This Was The 3rd Book...

Any additional comments?

I wish Audible had mentioned somewhere that this was the third and final book of the Shattered Sea series. They presented it as if it was a free standing new book. I had my suspicions while reading but I didn't do my own reattach until I was finished. I guess that's my bad but it would have been nice of Audible to mention it somewhere. Anywhere.

Ended up returning to the e-book

Is there anything you would change about this book?

I love Joe Abercrombie books. This is the first I tried as an audio book...and it was very disappointing. I think it was mostly the performance, not the writing. Halfway through, I found that I had no idea what was happening because I kept tuning out. So I picked up the ebook and immediately was engrossed in the action and characters.

So this was a tough one to rate because when I finally read it, I really really enjoyed it (not quite five star but definitely a 4 plus).

Felt like the story was somewhat Unfinished

By the end of the book I still had questions. so many topics just kinda went unanswered.

Boring compared to the previous parts

Really nothing new. Like yesterdays stew lukewarm, reheated in a microwave. Appart from "the heroes" this is my least favorite Abercrombie book.