Where this book really shines (surprise!) are the heists themselves. They asked us to scrape by in the dirt when once we used to walk…maybe not tall, but not stooped either.”Ī few other gems I found particularly shiny include the lines: ‘ Dathrax dropped like a piece of flaming midnight’ and ‘ F ire lanced down, scribbled murder on the battlefield‘. They asked us to give up everything we held dear whenever they wanted it. Lette, the hard-bitten mercenary, struggles to reconcile the woman she was with the woman she wants to be, while Quirk (a great name for a sorceress, by the way) has a past so surprisingly dark that when she finally unleashes her pent-up rage it was all I could do not to shout, “YOU GET YOURS, GIRL!”Įven Firkin, the seemingly senile madman, is glimpsed via flashback saying some wonderfully poignant stuff as he explains what humankind is asked to accept as part of their subjugation to the Dragon Lords:įirkin smiled, big and broad, and absent of all mirth. What’s more, each character is infused with heart as well. “I am thinking we are needing to be having some eggs!”). In fact, the aforementioned lizard-man, Balur, has such a unique and amusing manner of speaking that I found myself parroting it in real life (i.e. Every character, from the dragon-obsessed scholar who will do anything for a close encounter with one, to the hulking lizard-man whose answer to every question is to swing his hammer until the question itself is reduced to bloody pulp, brings something hilarious to the table. And certainly, authors like Joe Abercrombie and Scott Lynch have gotten people used to having a laugh now and then between scenes of epic awesomeness.įool’s Gold, however, keeps those laughs going the whole way through. I bought my first Terry Pratchett book on the day he died, and so learned just a little too late what a devastating loss that was. Humour in books was, lamentably, another. Hell, I wasted most of my childhood NOT drinking single malt scotch (thanks for that bottle of Macallan 12 on my 7th birthday, Uncle Rob!).
I’ll admit it took me too many years on this planet to come around to certain things I now love.