TITLE
Prince of Thorns
AUTHOR
Mark Lawrence
PUBLISHER
Harper Voyager
GENRE
Adult, dark fantasy, fiction
SYNOPSIS
Before the thorns taught me their sharp lessons and bled weakness from me I had but one brother, and I loved him well. But those days are gone and what is left of them lies in my mother’s tomb. Now I have many brothers, quick with knife and sword, and as evil as you please. We ride this broken empire and loot its corpse. They say these are violent times, the end of days when the dead roam and monsters haunt the night. All that’s true enough, but there’s something worse out there, in the dark. Much worse.
From being a privileged royal child, raised by a loving mother, Jorg Ancrath has become the Prince of Thorns, a charming, immoral boy leading a grim band of outlaws in a series of raids and atrocities. The world is in chaos: violence is rife, nightmares everywhere. Jorg has the ability to master the living and the dead, but there is still one thing that puts a chill in him. Returning to his father’s castle Jorg must confront horrors from his childhood and carve himself a future with all hands turned against him.Synopsis sourced from Goodreads.
Mark Lawrence’s debut novel tells a tale of blood and treachery, magic and brotherhood and paints a compelling and brutal, and sometimes beautiful, picture of an exceptional boy on his journey toward manhood and the throne.
INK STAINS
(Ink Stains are an equivalent to stars in any other form of rating, ranging from the standard 1 to 5 – for this review, they should be blood stains but oh well…)
REVIEW
There’s something brittle in me that will break before it bends.
So firstly, can I just say that I love how amazing, insane and darkly delicious this book was. I can’t even begin to express how going into this book I was given two warnings; one from the amazing Blue and one from one of the workers at my local QBD.
“This book is amazing, you will love it. Jorg is a f***ing menace.”
“Be careful. A lot of people didn’t like this one, just because the main character is very unorthodox.”
(Please take a moment to guess who said which)
Hate will keep you alive where love fails.
As I sit here, 11:30PM, I should be only thinking about this book. Because this book was gritty and all the amount of refreshing I think I’m beginning to really love about more adult books – unfortunately, right now, all my mind is thinking about is the fact my UberEats order got lost in transit and how much I was looking forward to that burger.
…you know you were influenced by a book when your first thought is “if I was in this book, I could get a pretty bloody revenge act.” Except I can’t, because I’m not in this book, and murder is bad.
Is revenge a science, or an art?
But Jorg made it look so good. Does it make me bad for crushing on a character who is younger than me? (Even if I know by the end of the trilogy he will be a man – and a badass man I hope he will be!) I think it’s a writing talent, to write in the mind of a young teenager but also bring in these intricate layers of some sort of maturity/sanity. Not that Jorg had much sanity – he’s ambitious, to start, and believes that anything he wants, he can get through cunning plans and brute force. It’s such an odd combination that doesn’t always work out for him, but he’s quick on his feet and stubborn to boot – though, I do think he has a lot to learn, Jorg is already starting out as a formidable enemy to everyone he meets.
Anything that you cannot sacrifice pins you.
Makes you predictable, makes you weak.
Some of the little quirks of Lawrence’s writing which I loved were those short character anecdotes at the beginning of each chapter. They were short, sweet and gave this oddly sentimental background development to characters who we only saw through Jorg’s eyes.
Lawrence spins a tale of deception, blood and dark magic – in this enthralling landscape of a post-apocalyptic that seems to have fallen backwards in time and into this pocket of fantasy meeting reality. Though I think in the end, it did take me a little bit longer to understand the world as we saw glimpses of things through Jorg but in the beginning, the world was one thing but by the end this human history component had made itself apparent and I didn’t really know what to do with it. I hope we get a bit more explanation of how these events came about – some of it is inferred, but I did have to piece bits together myself a lot which detracted from the overall magic for me.
In the end it seems we’re just toys, easy to break and hard to mend.
And the magic. Some of it I understood, but some of it i found myself reading paragraphs over and over because it was written as if I knew about it already (or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention). Once I got it though, I got it. And honestly, seeing it properly come alive by the end of the book, I adored it. Especially when as started to incorporate more with the world’s technology, which seems both medieval and modern (once you figure out those little tidbits of history, it starts making more sense) and it’s quite a vision. It makes you wonder what Jorg is capable of and I can’t wait to see about it in the coming books.
War, my friends, is a thing of beauty.
This book is dark and brutal, I recommend it for mature readers as it can be quite confronting. There are mentions of topics which also may act as a trigger.
Have you read Prince of Thorns? What did you think of it?
The biggest lies we save for ourselves.
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Connect with Mark Lawrence on his Website and Blog for his other books, talk with his on Twitter, see updates on his Instagram and also, on Goodreads.
Life of Ink and Words 