The Fantasy Review’s Spoiler-Free Review of A Little Hatred by Joe Abercrombie.
This new series starts off with a bangI A Little Hatred is set roughly 30 years after the end of Last Argument of Kings and 15 years after Red Country.
Everything about this book is even better than the previous trilogy and standalones: from character work to the worldbuilding. Also, more time was taken over making an awesome plot which has plenty of twists that have great payoff.
The worldbuilding is brilliant! We enter a new age of technology in the First Law world with the industrial revolution. All this progress also comes with new conflicts fueled by politics, power and money – some things never change.
I loved that many of the characters were related in some way to characters we loved from previous books, and that they were their own, unique selves rather than copy-and-paste versions of these previous characters.
We have plenty of political intrigue, epic battle scenes, and more of everything we loved about Joe Abercrombie’s previous books.
It does feel like people can’t read this book without first reading the six previous novels in The First Law world, as you would miss so much! However, if you wanted to jump in here, you would still have a great time with it, and probably be encouraged to read all the previous books once you finished it!
