I Read Books: A LIttle Hatred

 

A Little Hatred

A new generation has grown up after the events of The First Law trilogy. In the Union an age of progress; the lords are enclosing the land, the people forced off heading for the cities to work in the mills and manufactories. This has made some people staggeringly rich, including Savine dan Glokta, daughter of the head of the Inquisition Arch Lector Glokta. Others are less happy with the situation, the Breakers seeking to improve working conditions in the face of increasingly violent opposition from the owners, and the Burners who seek to burn it all down.

The Union has been impoverished by wars in Styria (see Best Served Cold) so when the King Of The North and his nephew and heir invade Angland and the Dogman’s Protectorate, it’s the lady Governor of Angland and her son Leo dan Brock who have to fight them. Escaping the northmen is Rikke, the Dogman’s daughter, who may have the Long Eye, the ability to see the past, the future and more.

Crown Prince Orso rises from his dissipation to try to help. The treasury is bare, but if he can find the money then they will give him permission to lead a force to save Angland. And as it happens he’s having a very clandestine affair with the richest woman in the Union, Savine dan Glokta. Yet his dreams of glory are derailed when there is a worker’s uprising in Valbeck – complicatedly led by a renegade Inquisitor and also by an undercover Inquisitor. Orso and his army are sent there – where Savine, visiting her factories, is trapped.

All this is Abercrombie’s trademark grit, with characters put in bad situations making bad decisions and sometimes being called out, sometimes muddling through. It’s darkly funny, with characters aware of the forces around them, yet sometimes helpless to act (including the order of wizards, working behind the scenes but mostly through their sinister bank). This extends from the nobles and generals caught in various whims, to the workers and soldiers who (because they are viewpoint characters in a novel) find their actions have larger consequences. The revolutionaries are clearly in the right, and of course that makes their hideous crimes even worse.

Read This: Smart, dark, gritty fantasy novel about trying to do things and how no one is grateful
Don’t Read This: Violent, unpleasant people doing horrid things