The Way Of Shadows

Brent Week´s book The Way Of Shadows is about a young boy named Azoth who lives in the slums with his two friends Doll Girl and Jarl. Azoth is constantly tired of never being able to stand up for his friends because he is too weak to do anything. Azoth aspires to become a wetboy, an assassin with special powers, so he can become strong enough to never be afraid ever again. He wants to be trained by the best wetboy in town, Durzo Blint. But Durzo is known for never taking any apprentices. So Azoth needs to do something drastic to impress Durzo.

This is the first book in the trilogy The Night Angel so this book is mostly about Azoths´ training to become a wetboy and a lot about the characters backstories so you get to know who they are. So it is not so much action in this book but it is still a pretty exciting book because there are a bunch of key events in it.

I would recommend this book to everybody who is as good as me at understanding english or better because the english is pretty hard to understand, even I sometimes had a hard time understanding the english but I often figured it out through context. But I think that you need to be the age range of 16 and higher because the book is pretty dark so younger people might not like it as much as older people and if you are 16 you should be able to understand this books english.

This books storyline expands over roughly 14 years so you get to see how the characters change through the book. I love how you can see that Azoth changes from a boy who cares about his friends to a man who works only as a weapon and would kill anybody to survive. The book is told by an omniscient narrator and it jumps back and forth a lot between the main story and side stories so there is a lot of names to keep track of but the story still felt coherent.

I found it difficult to care about the character Durzo Blint at first in this book because he was always pretty mean towards everybody and at first he seemed to only care about himself. later on he started opening up and you could see that he actually cared about other people even though he did not show it in a normal way he still showed it in his own way. That is why Durzo Blint is easily my favorite character in the book.

A thing that I think could be better with this book is that there is nearly more about the side stories than the main story in this book and I enjoyed the main story a lot more than the side stories so it was a little bit of a let-down when they changed from the main story to the side stories. But it was pretty good too because I got really eager to get to the main story again so while I was reading the side stories the tension built up until I got to the main story again.

To summarize I would recommend this book for teenagers and people who like the assassin/fantasy genre that has a dark story. This is by far the best book I have ever read, I remember how I stayed up way after my bedtime just because I could not stop turning the pages. Personally I would give this book a 10/10!

Erik Jonsson. Peer corrected by Jens Josefsson, and Hampus Nyström. NATE15