The first point of view character in our trio starts the book as Princess Skara of Throvenland.

Though, admittedly, Abercrombie doesn’t lose much of the intimate focus of the previous volumes, aided by his usual skill in thrusting the reader into close-up third person perspectives.

Sure, there is a certain aesthetic harmony to this pattern, but it also means that this third book is more sprawling and perhaps more in the vein of other similar epic fantasies, being, well, more epic. You see, book one, Half a King (reviewed by Mark Yon here), was told through a single perspective with book two, Half the World (reviewed by Mark Yon here), we had a couple of viewpoint characters and, this time, book three offers, no prizes for guessing, three view point characters. Having said this, and keeping in mind the high esteem in which I hold the previous two books in the trilogy, I did find this third book in the series not quite as tightly written and a little more laboriously plotted than the previous books. To my mind this is a shame, as I believe this latest trilogy from Abercrombie is up there with the strongest work he’s done to date, being more focused and efficiently plotted than much contemporary epic fantasy. Abercrombie is a perennial favourite of ours at the SFFWorld forums, but it strikes me that this latest series has received a less than enthusiastic response compared to his previous novels set in the world of the First Law, with some treating the book, ostensibly marketed as YA, as being “Abercrombie-lite”. Half a War by Joe Abercrombie marks the conclusion of his Shattered Sea trilogy.

Half a war joe abercrombie