I could not find a previous review of this book to tack mine onto though I'm sure there should be one?
I absolutely stormed through Prince of Thorns. Whatever else I may say about this book it is certainly a major page turner; full of action with very little chance to catch your breath in between.
It is set in a distant future some thousand years after a catastrophic nuclear (presumably) war where human society has not managed yet to get past a medieval existence. However this is one of the areas of world building that I did find some fault with. Not everything has been lost from the past and indeed they still have the writings of ‘ancients’ ranging from Plato to Nietzsche but these writings are now laboriously hand copied complete with illuminations. The problem that I have is that they do have some ancient originals so the concept of printing cannot have been alien to them and the technology needed to construct a press is certainly available. My problem is that, given the knowledge of the idea of a press and the technology capable of building one, they would have done so by the time of this book and I felt similarly about a number of other technologies in the book.
The supernatural aspects also did not sit well with me; the idea that so many people dying simultaneously in the ‘Day of a Thousand Suns’ (nice name!) had ‘broken’ the door to the other world was a little too much for me. But then I’m not a great one for the supernatural so that’s probably just me. Another criticism that is probably just me, is that that I found the callous brutality just a bit too much; it went (again for me) over the edge of gritty and into unpleasant and Jorg’s constant desire to see people’s heads rolling across the ground became rather irritating. However, as the story progressed, this brutality was much less emphasised and I found it easier to get on with.
Another serious criticism I had was the age of Jorg; I think Lawrence would have done better to have made him closer to sixteen to be more plausible. I know we have child soldiers aged around thirteen in the modern world today but I don’t think that makes a good parallel. First Jorg comes from a privileged upbringing and is well educated as opposed to modern child soldiers coming from a desperate upbringing where they have been conditioned to brutality, and, second, these child soldiers fight with guns which can make anyone deadly, Jorg, on the other hand, is a thirteen-year-old child fighting with a full sized adult sword (stolen from his father); I simply don’t believe any thirteen year old could wield such a sword for more than a minute or two and certainly not effectively against other similarly armed adults. The strength is simply not yet there at that age and this was simply not realistic for me. Incidentally I was constantly bugged by how he got that sword, which information was withheld much, much longer than was necessary for the story.
As mentioned earlier this is a story that rattles along at a phenomenal pace though one that is sometimes possibly a little too fast for its own good. There were a few points where a little more explanation or detail would have left me a little less confused. But at the same time that pace was what kept me turning the pages despite my other grumbles and that, ultimately, ensured I did enjoy the read and will be going on to the second book in the series.
I absolutely stormed through Prince of Thorns. Whatever else I may say about this book it is certainly a major page turner; full of action with very little chance to catch your breath in between.
It is set in a distant future some thousand years after a catastrophic nuclear (presumably) war where human society has not managed yet to get past a medieval existence. However this is one of the areas of world building that I did find some fault with. Not everything has been lost from the past and indeed they still have the writings of ‘ancients’ ranging from Plato to Nietzsche but these writings are now laboriously hand copied complete with illuminations. The problem that I have is that they do have some ancient originals so the concept of printing cannot have been alien to them and the technology needed to construct a press is certainly available. My problem is that, given the knowledge of the idea of a press and the technology capable of building one, they would have done so by the time of this book and I felt similarly about a number of other technologies in the book.
The supernatural aspects also did not sit well with me; the idea that so many people dying simultaneously in the ‘Day of a Thousand Suns’ (nice name!) had ‘broken’ the door to the other world was a little too much for me. But then I’m not a great one for the supernatural so that’s probably just me. Another criticism that is probably just me, is that that I found the callous brutality just a bit too much; it went (again for me) over the edge of gritty and into unpleasant and Jorg’s constant desire to see people’s heads rolling across the ground became rather irritating. However, as the story progressed, this brutality was much less emphasised and I found it easier to get on with.
Another serious criticism I had was the age of Jorg; I think Lawrence would have done better to have made him closer to sixteen to be more plausible. I know we have child soldiers aged around thirteen in the modern world today but I don’t think that makes a good parallel. First Jorg comes from a privileged upbringing and is well educated as opposed to modern child soldiers coming from a desperate upbringing where they have been conditioned to brutality, and, second, these child soldiers fight with guns which can make anyone deadly, Jorg, on the other hand, is a thirteen-year-old child fighting with a full sized adult sword (stolen from his father); I simply don’t believe any thirteen year old could wield such a sword for more than a minute or two and certainly not effectively against other similarly armed adults. The strength is simply not yet there at that age and this was simply not realistic for me. Incidentally I was constantly bugged by how he got that sword, which information was withheld much, much longer than was necessary for the story.
As mentioned earlier this is a story that rattles along at a phenomenal pace though one that is sometimes possibly a little too fast for its own good. There were a few points where a little more explanation or detail would have left me a little less confused. But at the same time that pace was what kept me turning the pages despite my other grumbles and that, ultimately, ensured I did enjoy the read and will be going on to the second book in the series.
