Book Review: The Blinding Knife by Brent Weeks

 

Goodreads Summary: Gavin Guile is dying. He'd thought he had five years left--now he has less than one. With fifty thousand refugees, a bastard son, and an ex-fiancée who may have learned his darkest secret, Gavin has problems on every side. All magic in the world is running wild and threatens to destroy the Seven Satrapies. Worst of all, the old gods are being reborn, and their army of color wights is unstoppable. The only salvation may be the brother whose freedom and life Gavin stole sixteen years ago.

Goodreads Ratings: 4.38 stars with over 81,000 ratings

Genre listing: Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Fiction, Magic, Adventure

Previous Review on the series: The Black Prism

Goodreads Challenge: 34/50

2021 Reading Challenge: #39 Read a book over 600 pages (Find the entire challenge here)

Book Review:

Hello readers! I hope everyone is doing well this lovely Sunday afternoon. I am super ready to just kick back and watch football all day while I work on homework. I wanted to try and get this review out beforehand. It's going to be a busy week. We're moving into our new house (Yay!!!!!) next weekend, and I still need to pack a bunch of stuff. 

I'm honestly just going to get straight to the point with this one. If you like magic and epic fantasy, read the Lightbringer series by Brent Weeks. This is quickly becoming one of my absolute favorite series. I liked The Blinding Knife quite a bit more than The Black Prism, just because I wasn't trying to figure out the magic system. Not having to think about how the different colors and drafters work made it easier to get through. 

I really like that Brent Weeks made Gavin a hero, but not a boy scout type of hero. He feels like a realistic character because he has his flaws and makes mistakes. He does what he needs to, but there's a lot of complexity and gray areas to who he is. I think it makes him really interesting to read and a lot more likable. 

I really liked seeing Kip go through his trials to figure out who he is and wants to be.  I'm curious to see how his story plays out. He's in this awkward place where he still has the childishness because he's 15 but also is starting to grow out of it. He comes across as just having a huge heart who wants to do the right thing. I adore some of his internal thoughts. I find them sarcastic and humorous.

I don't want to spoil too much in this book because there are so many plot twists. I will say that Brent Weeks is an evil genius when it comes to plot twists. There are so many moments where I'm like, "Holy Shit! Wait, What just happened?" It makes the book so exciting to read because I never know what's going to happen. There were a couple of things that I kind of expected to some extent, but not many. This book is the main reason I've not slept recently. The "one more chapter" bargain ended with multiple nights of me forcing myself to put my kindle down at 3-3:30 am. 

One of the more fascinating pieces of this book that I didn't fully appreciate in The Black Prism is the intricacies of the society Brent Weeks has created. At the top of society, you have the religious leaders being The Prism and The White and then the color spectrum representing the different regions. The associations within the areas are super political. Some get along, some don't, etc. From there, it's just this classist system based on the colors. If you can draft colors, you're of higher status than those who can't. The more colors you can draft, the more your status rises. There's a whole system of drafters being sponsored within the Chromeria, which is influenced by what colors you draft and how many. Which results in the lower classes having to become slaves just to be trained. The slavery aspect is challenging for me to read. I feel this way about any book that I read with it included. That being said, I think it goes a long way in this book to show the extremes in how the different drafters are valued. 

Liv annoyed me in this book. I can't remember my thoughts on her in The Black Prism. Her anger at the Chromeria feels fake, and she doesn't necessarily believe in the Color Prince's cause. I can't really tell if she's supposed to be a likable character or not, but to me, she comes across as a spoiled brat who is just angsty because she didn't get attention and is treated like a princess in Chromeria. 

There's so much about this book I want to talk about, but I just can't bring myself to get into them because I don't want to spoil all of the plot twists for someone. I'll just leave it at I highly recommend this book and series to anyone who loves Epic Fantasy and adventure books with complex magic systems. It's so good, and I honestly could not put this book down. One thing to note is that if you are looking at this book on Goodreads, some readers have listed this as YA and a Children's book. One of the main characters is fifteen, but I would definitely not put this as YA or a Children's story. It's pretty violent, and there's a lot of sexual content involved. There is mention of rape, some of the previously mentioned slaves are sex slaves, and at one point, a character gets teased for how vocal they were doing sex. I can typically look past a lot of this kind of stuff in books and movies, but understand that some cannot so I wanted to make sure I give a warning.