The First Law

The Blade Itself is a slow burn that gets accused of being all setup and no payoff by readers expecting a faster fantasy plot, and I understand the complaint even though I don’t fully share it. Abercrombie spends this whole first volume building four or five deeply flawed people and letting you sit with how genuinely unpleasant most of them are before the actual plot machinery starts turning in earnest.

Glokta is the reason to read this book, full stop, and I’m not the only one who landed there. A crippled torturer working for an empire he privately despises, narrating his own physical decline with a black humor that carries most of the book’s best lines, he’s the character every review I read kept coming back to first, with Logen Ninefingers and Collem West mentioned as strong seconds but clearly a tier below. That’s the right read. The other viewpoints are solid, Glokta is the one you actually miss when the chapter ends.

Where I’d flag a real caveat is pacing across the trilogy as a whole rather than just this opening book. The middle volume in particular reads like exactly the kind of transitional slog longer fantasy series are known for, and more than one reader who pushed through admitted feeling a little cheated by how the ending resolves certain threads, cheap is the word one review used, and I understand the frustration even if I think the character work throughout justifies sticking it out.

This is grimdark before grimdark was fully a marketing term, cynical about heroism, funny in a way a lot of imitators since have missed entirely, and genuinely mean to its own cast in ways that feel earned rather than gratuitous. Four stars for a strong, character-driven opener that asks real patience of you before it starts collecting on what it set up.