The Heroes and Red Country - Joe Abercrombie
I'm rereading Joe Abercrombie's books for the first time since initial publication. Use the tags to find the posts about them. This post collates my Goodreads reviews of The Heroes and Red Country.
#The Heroes
My memory of The Heroes is that I didn't love it because I don't really like military fantasy, but on a re-read it's brilliant and is immediately one of my favourite in the series. This feels like a real return to form after the relative disappointment of Best Served Cold. All the POV characters feel distinct again, and the view of the battle from every side works brilliantly.
Where I felt like recurring characters in Best Server Cold didn't really add anything to the narrative (especially Vitari, who could have been literally anyone else) here they function brilliantly. Gorst is given depth and and weight, Bayaz is further revealed to be the bastard we all knew him to be, and Black Dow is delivered one of the most fitting endings any character has received so far. The most impressive part is Calder, though. He's written with so much sympathy throughout the novel that we develop a ton of empathy for him, only to be shown him as we've seen him in the past in the final scenes - scheming, sneering, hateful. It's a master stroke of characterisation and some of Joe's best work in showing us a person from every possible angle.
Red Country
This is another one that I don't really remember from the first time I read it but I think it's my favourite of them all. It's definitely the least standalone of the three post-original-trilogy books - it relies on you knowing the history of the many recurring characters in order to get the most out of it - but that just makes it even stronger in terms of emotional weight. Shivers' story especially is given a really good ending that feels incredibly satisfying after the journey we've seen him go on, and it's really nice to finally get to see Logen back in action after all this time.