“Sharp Ends is the ultimate collection of award-winning tales and exclusive new short stories from the master of grimdark fantasy, Joe Abercrombie.
Violence explodes, treachery abounds, and the words are as deadly as the weapons in this rogue’s gallery of sideshows, backstories, and sharp endings from the world of the First Law.“
Title: Sharp Ends
Series: First Law World #7
Author: Joe Abercrombie
Page Count: 369
Genre: Fantasy
Rating: 4.5/5.0
Date Read: July 19th, 2022
Reading the First Law World has been just about a year long journey at this point. Getting to this point has been an adventure for sure. I didn’t know how well I’d like this one as I knew coming into it, this was a collection of short stories. I’m still not sure if these were parts cut from the release versions or if these were written separately after the fact. Reading it after the previous 6 books though worked well for me. I thought it was interesting to see some different points of views or scenes just before or after other parts covered in previous books.
Obviously these all had the usual Abercrombie feel to them so no issues with pacing. Obviously the world and character development has happened prior to this book. If someone were to pick this up simply as a one off standalone it would probably feel rather chaotic though.
A couple of my favorites were as follows:
A Beautiful Bastard – it’s great seeing more of Glokta before he was a physically broken man!
Some Desperado – as I really enjoyed some of the standalone novels reading more about Smoke was a lot of fun again!
Freedom – Nicomo Cosco is definitely one of my favorite characters within the First Law world so always entertaining to read more of him. This was great to hear what the in story writer first drafted and then to hear Nicomo’s reaction!
Made a Monster – And of course reading the trials and adventures of Logan Nine Fingers throughout the previous books was great. But this one little scene just helped explained so much to me on how this man thinks…or doesn’t. It was great to read the relationship between he and Bethard in this little scene and the complications created in this moment.
Overall if you’re a fan of the First Law Trilogy and/or the standalones that have come after, this is definitely worth the read through. If you’re someone who hasn’t dipped your toe into this world yet, I’d recommend reading some of the other books in this world first to have a better understanding of the world and the characters within it.
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