This book was gritty, gory, and genuinely edgy. Thank God I love all of those things about it.
The plot focuses on young Dagan, who lives a hard knock life. His mother attempts to murder him. He is left outside for wild dogs to feast on. He is rescued and then sold into slavery. The poor tot has all around abysmal fortune. His luck eventually changes and he is apprenticed to a man known only as Blackstone, who trains him to be a badass. Enough said.
The first twenty pages, I could've cared less about little orphan Dagan, but I became oddly attached shortly thereafter.
There was one paragraph in the book that irked me: "It was the silence like the one that comes after the headman's axe had fallen. It was the silence like the hollow ring of an empty barrel. It was a silence like death." A little too like The Name of the Wind for me.
The prose throughout the book is very stark, and in the first half, I noticed spelling and grammar issues, but it doesn't detract from the book. The story is told in the style of the unreliable narrator, who we have met in a bar, an older version of Dagan. You could see the author behind the scenes when Dagan said, "Let me speak of it now." There were certain redundancies in the book like this one repeated three times: "But that is not the story that is told today" could've been better as "Yet now the tale has changed". Little things like that bothered me in the first half, but the second was smooth sailing.
I recommend this book to anyone who has an e-reader and a dollar to spare. Also, if you enjoyed The Name of the Wind or The Lies of Locke Lamora, it'll be a bonus.
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars for an excellent indie read!
Content: Gore and rape, not particularly explicit. For mature audiences and rebellious teens
Page Count: 198 pages in the e-book
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