How are you all finding the stories?
Joe Abercrombie is one of my favourite writers, and I thought his Shattered Sea YA trilogy was superb. But with Sharp Ends I felt there was a serious lack of depth - as if, being short stories, they were never given much care or attention.
The first one about Glotka is just someone watching. It was interesting to read - but it's a prequel scene, a fragment, rather than a story. In itself, a minor complaint - but the collection never seemed to improve beyond this.
The Shevedieh and Javre stories came across as woefully underdeveloped for me - it was like reading a cartoon. Writing that someone is "dark-skinned" and a lesbian is not a proxy for character development. The story where they meet Whirrun opened with pages of chatter about the cold and little else, and I would not have expected that to have been allowed to stand in one of his novels.
There is an argument that these are just short stories, therefore there isn't the ability to devote so much attention - but Javre and Shev take up around half this book.
All in all, rather than Sharp Ends it comes across as Scrap Ends. I'm not trying to sound mean-spirited, but I just never felt as though the stories were treated as anything other than throw-away leftovers and discards, that were never given the serious treatment, thought, or consideration, normally found in Abercrombie's novels.
I sincerely hope everyone else disagrees with me - I just couldn't help feeling disappointed with this.Maybe I just had too much of a writerly head on and needed to let go.
Though, it probably didn't help that my review copy suffered so badly from formatting issues that the whole reading experience suffered. Never heard back from Gollancz when I emailed them about it, and didn't want to kick up much of a fuss when the launch and signings were imminent.
