The Blacktongue Thief

Product Information

I’d like to thank Macmillian Audio, Christopher Buelhman, and Netgalley for the chance to read and review an early copy of this title. On the High Fantasy Spectrum of Self-Seriousness, with Tolkien on one end and Pratchett on the other, Christopher Buehlman’s The Blacktongue Thief sits comfortably in the middle, though perhaps favoring the wry humor and deprecation of Discworld over the portent of Middle-earth. With poor Kinch having to pause life at nearly every turn so that someone can smack him across the face- it was difficult not to burst out laughing at times.

I was only a month in with this group, and we had robbed wagons with too few guards, kidnapped stragglers off groups with too many, and even sold a merchant’s boy to a group of crooked soldiers who were supposed to be chasing us. However, this is more of a personal thing; long seafaring sections in high fantasy rarely worked for me. Some highlighted passages caused me to laugh, pushed the story forward, and offered nuggets of quotable wisdom or some form of innovation—all within a sentence or two. And that's the true story of how on the tenth day of Vintners, I ended up betting my arse on a card game in a sewer, under an army of murdering giants at the very top of the wicked world.Walked off with it while a mate argued with a music student about whether his singing at a tavern had been in key. I glanced left and saw Pagran bent over, covered in blood, but I think it was Frella’s—she was bleeding enough for both of them, spattering the ground from a vicious underarm cut that looked to run elbow to tit. As it stands, the character voice and witty humor were enough to carry the book and make it incredibly fun to read despite the lack of aforementioned development or any sort of momentum. The fact that Kinch is beholden to the Takers Guild for his education as a thief, a debt he is unable to pay off and hence ends up in servitude to them, of course strikes a contemporary note.

A medida que Kinch nos transmite sus diversas hazañas en primera persona podemos echar un vistazo al mundo que lo rodea.

Kinch picked Galva—a knight, a survivor of the brutal goblin wars, and handmaiden of the goddess of death.

Although to me, it won't quite be a best of the year read, it is an admirable and thrilling fantasy debut for Buehlman who has a lot to offer to the world of modern fantasy. I’m thoroughly grateful to Gollancz for sending me an early copy because now I truly understand the hype. The Blacktongue Thief is told through Kinch’s first-person perspective, and Buehlman did an excellent job in giving him a high level of distinctive voice that reminded me of what Peter McLean did with his War for the Rose Throne quartet.

At my back, I had a nasty spike of a rondel dagger, good to punch through mail, but against that sword in that woman’s hand, not to mention the fucking bird, it might as well have been a twig. Unfortunately, Kinch’s fate gets entangled with the knight Galva, and he now finds himself forced to go on an epic journey. For example, a village with one mud road, one tavern that’s really just the back of a fat man’s house, and a dying ox everyone shares at plowing time will have an Allgod church. As well as Bully Boy the cat ("Rao"), the novel is littered with memorable and detailed characters, notable inclusions are the aforementioned knight Galva, the niece of a witch Norrigal, and Kinch's fellow countryman Malk. It's a delicate balance, and this here is a shining example of how to do it, with big pluses and minuses.