Series: Book 1 in the Locke Lamora series
Rating: ****
Tags: Fiction, General, Fantasy, Epic, Fantasy - General, American Science Fiction And Fantasy, Fiction - Fantasy, Orphans, Fantasy - Epic, Swindlers and Swindling, Gangsters, Brigands and Robbers, Picaresque Literature, Lang:en
Summary
Life imitates art and art scams life in Lynch's debut, a
picaresque fantasy that chronicles the career of Locke
Lamora—orphan, thief and leader of the Gentlemen
Bastards—from the time the Thiefmaker sells Locke to
the faking Eyeless Priest up to Locke's latest con of the
nobility of the land of Camorr. As in any good caper novel,
the plot is littered with obvious and not-so-obvious
obstacles, including the secret police of Camorr's legendary
Spider and the mysterious assassinations of gang leaders by
the newly arrived Gray King. Locke's resilience and wit give
the book the tragicomic air of a traditional picaresque,
rubbery ethics and all. The villain holds the best moral
justification of any of the players. Lynch provides plenty of
historical and cultural information reminiscent of new
weirdists Steven Erikson and China Miéville, if not
quite as outré. The only drawback is that the realistic
fullness of the background tends to accentuate the unreality
of the melodramatic foreground.
(July)
Starred Review On a distant world, orphan Locke
Lamora is sold into a crew of thieves and con artists. Soon
his natural gifts make him an underworld celebrity, leader of
the flamboyantly larcenous Gentleman Bandits. But there is
someone who covets Locke's talents, his success, his very
life, forcing him to put everything on the line to protect
himself. With a world so vividly realized that it's
positively tactile, and characters so richly drawn that they
threaten to walk right off the page, this is one of those
novels that reaches out and grabs readers, pulling us into
the middle of the action. With this debut novel, Lynch
immediately establishes himself as a gifted and fearless
storyteller, unafraid of comparisons to Silverberg and
Jordan, not to mention David Liss and even Dickens (the
parallels to
Oliver Twist offer an appealing extra dimension to
the story, although the novel is no mere reimagining of that
Victorian classic). Fans of lavishly appointed fantasy will
be in seventh heaven here, but it will be nearly as popular
with readers of literary crime fiction. This is a true genre
bender, at home on almost any kind of fiction shelf. Expect
it to be among the year's most impressive debuts.
David Pitt
From Publishers Weekly
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