Only read the second one, but yeah, it all sounds familiar. The second is meant to be an improvement on the first(according to author's own readers' poll, anyway), though and while I wouldn't recommend it as anything but a grimdark-fantasy fix, I was still sufficiently fascinated to finish it in a couple of evenings.
The one thing the author did with some skill, though, was setting up Chekhov's Guns. At best of times, it felt like a medieval Artemis Fowl substitute. "Past is really future" gimmick was also nice, but it was only used for the "cool" stuff like that nuke. If the author was willing to do the hard work of portraying how an actual modern Europe with current population and religious make-up (or, less ambitiously, one of say, 1995) would have looked like after that catastrophe, it might well have transcended its "GOT for angsty teens" roots. Instead, he simply transposed all the Dark Ages stereotypes into the setting completely unchanged, and let a great opportunity go to waste.
Leave a Comment:
2/5, can't recommend in good faith
Dark fantasy is in these days, and Prince of Thorns is about as dark as you can get. The premise seems interesting enough: a (presumed dead) prince seeks power above all else to avenge the murder of his family. The book details his Start of Darkness and rise to power.
Prince Jorg Ancrath is the sole protagonist, and also the least likable character. This is a problem. His very first scene has him slaughtering a village of farmers, raping the women and then burning them alive for no reason whatsoever. This moustache-twirling brand of Stupid Evil seems like the perfect setup for an exploration on how Jorg came to be this way, but Prince of Thorns never delivers. There is no slippery slope, no descent into madness and cruelty - Jorg just becomes evil incarnate overnight. And from there on out, it's just evil followed by more evil, often without rhyme or reason.
These shallow attempts at shock value only serve to underline how much of a Villain Stu Jorg is. Despite being only 10 to 14 years old (depending on the timeline) his badass accomplishments simply stretch suspension of disbelief. Young, competent protagonists are common in fantasy, but Mark Lawrence takes it too far. Practically every other chapter Jorg intimidates or kills trained guardsmen, commanders, duelists, knights and other beefcakes twice his size and age. At the age of 10 he takes control of a gang of murderers, rapists, thieves and assassins. At the age of 14 he conquers an entire kingdom on a whim, with only a handful of men. And the entire book is like that.
The reason why Reality Ensues doesn't apply to Jorg actually gets explained in the book, albeit very late, and not in a particularly satisfying manner. Then there's the way it shamelessly rips off and hamfistedly references other (fantasy) literature. For example: Jorg refers to his ambitions as "playing the game of thrones". Cringe.
Then there's phrases like: "Is revenge a science, or an art?", "I'm not afraid of the dark", "I swallowed the night, and the night swallowed me" or - my favorite - "all the heat of [the day] couldn't touch the ice in me". Sad to say, but Prince of Thorns reads like an angry teenager's Power Fantasy.