sneaky boy book!

look. I know. it is a book about a small orphan who becomes the best assassin in the city and there is a grizzled mentor and a girl he fails to protect. it is every single thing on the list. if you handed me this premise on a page I would tell you to put it down.

but it RIPS. it absolutely rips. Durzo Blint is a great character precisely because he is the cliche and the book knows he is the cliche, and there is stuff going on with him underneath that I did not see coming at all and that pays off properly by the end of the trilogy.

the first act is grim in a way that feels earned rather than edgy, and then somewhere in the second half it turns into a much more political book about a city and who is running it, which I liked more than the assassin stuff if I'm honest, which is a weird thing to say about a book called this.

problems: Weeks writes women like a man who has been told about women. the fate that keeps happening to female characters in this got flagged in my Discord and once you see it you cannot unsee it and it drops this from a nine to an eight for me. also the timeline in the back half is held together with tape.

but I read all three in about ten days on holiday in Crete and got sunburnt down one side of my body because I would not move off the lounger. eight. no regrets, some skin damage.