Most recent book I've read: Prince of Thorns - Mark Lawrence

It's not often that I'm surprised by a book.  I haven't read everything by any stretch of the imagination, but enough to know that all stories are basically amalgamations of the books that have come before.  Characters change but their motives don't, so it's hard to really separate apart from the herd when trying to create something new, or at least newish.

Lawrence did just that with "Prince of Thorns," a book that came out late last year to a good amount of fanfare in the tiny (but growing) circle of fantasy nudniks, a bit of praise that I think was extremely appropriate.

The story follows a tale that's been told often, one of a dead parent and a son who wants revenge, but where it steps aside from the conventional path to forage alone in the night is in the characters, or to be specific, the Character: Jorg Ancarath.  Jorg has seen the brutal murders of his mother and brother and that has left him with a slightly skewed and awfully bloody view of the world around him.

The environment that Lawrence has crafted is in this writer's opinion a post apocalypic world that has reverted back to the Middle Ages where any and everything from the time before has been lost and forgotten.  He does a great job of leaving that fact (or maybe not a fact?) to the reader's interpretation, instead devoting the bulk of attentionto Jorg and the journey that the 14 year old prince has undertaken.

The magic system, an area that I usually want to be verbose, big, and grand, is sparse and isn't really well understood but it works for the reader as the reader is just as clueless to how the magic works as Jorg is.  The story isn't driven by the magic like a lot of books nowadays, or by a sense of code or ethics, but more by a lack of a compulsion to do what's right.  Jorg does what he wants and does it in a way that is often scary, dark, and disturbing.  You might think that this would disconnect the reader from the story but it really didn't for me.

There isn't much I'd change or that I didn't like about the book.  It was just long enough, not a volume that took weeks to finish and it was written in a tight, deliberate, and clever manner that had me upset when the book finished only because the sequel's not out yet.

Pick it up, you'll enjoy it.