Review #3 of 2024: The Shattered Sea Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie

In an attempt to get more of my reading done in Spanish and get through some of my Goodreads, TBR backlogs, I’ve been reading children’s and young adult fantasy translations. While I probably should be reading novels originally written in Spanish rather than in English, and the translation almost certainly impacts the quality of the story for the worse (a topic for another blog post), making these books a language-learning activity is the only way in which some of them are going to get read. I also have quite the association between Joe Abercrombie’s work and the Spanish language: out of the ten of his books that I’ve read, seven have been in Spanish. However, the review that follows will be in English, you can find my reviews of the individual books in Spanish on my Goodreads profile.

Joe Abercrombie is a British fantasy writer most famous for his First Law trilogy. I talk a little about this first trilogy in this blog post, but in short, Abercrombie’s books are some of the best-executed examples of bittersweetness in fantasy.1 What do I mean by this? The characters in the First Law and Shattered Sea Trilogies often get what they want by the end of the narrative, but there is almost always a catch. Maybe their character development has caused them not to want what they once wanted anymore, the cost of success was too high, or the…