Fantasy Book Club Series discussion

Have you finished reading A Little Hatred by Joe Abercrombie, Book 1 in the Age of Madness trilogy? Let us know what you thought about it.

Spoilers for Book 1 OK in this topic.

well, I finished this book finally. Took me longer than it probably should have. I'll post a few thoughts once i can pick my jaw up off the floor.

I don’t think I had heard of Joe Abercrombie before this came up as a group read on Goodreads, but I wanted to start something new. So I started the book. I was thrown into a world, and like most fantasy books, you don’t know how all the characters and plots fit together at first. That is probably my biggest complaint with this book. For the first fourth of the book, I felt a little lost. But I trudged on.

I was ok with the book until we got into some of the graphic descriptions of what this industrial revolution looked like (children forced into slave labor and abhorrent working conditions). This section of the book was very difficult to read. Also, Sevine didn’t know this was going on…. How do you not know??? I ended up taking a break from the book when I was in the middle of this section, right around the time of the revolution, but I eventually made my way back to it. I went through about 50% of the book thinking that I would finish this and probably never read anything by this author again. Then as I got closer and closer to the end, I feel like the author kind of shook me a little and screamed, “YOU MUST CONTINUE WITH THIS SERIES!!!” I won’t post any spoilers here, but I will say that this book starts off rather slow and then once all the groundwork has been laid… hold on!

This book was a different than what I am used to reading, but I am glad that I read it. For me, books like this are read in small doses, and this isn’t anything that I could binge-read, but it did grip me towards the end. I am curious if the next book will start off as slow or if it will basically continue where this one left off, with me asking: Why did they..? What the…? How..?

Christina wrote: " I won’t post any spoilers here."

This is a “spoiler” topic thread, so feel free, if you want. Readers are warned at the beginning that there may be spoilers.

I’m not reading along this time around (too many other things going on) but I’m interested if other group members has the same experience of a slow start and then, hold on!

I read this book a while back and not as part of this group read. I know I wrote a review on here but I can't find it. There are thousands of reviews of it and I don't have the time to search all of them to find mine. Sorry.

Suffice it to say, I loved this book. The characters are memorable. Most of them are morally grey, which I love.

The world-building is solid and the plot is intriguing. I gave it five stars.

Great book! I think this will be one of the top books of 2024 for me.

Christina wrote: "I don’t think I had heard of Joe Abercrombie before this came up as a group read on Goodreads, but I wanted to start something new. So I started the book. I was thrown into a world, and like most f..."

Do you think the characters are going to change now that they have seen what is going on in society?

Kevin- it's hard for me to answer that without giving too much away for the next book. I can tell you that they still managed to surprise me in the next book. Abercrombie seems to be great with twists and turns.