Book Review: The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

[wshaffer]

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



It's really obvious that Scott Lynch has read and loved a lot of the same books that I have read and loved. Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar stories are probably the most obvious influence on this book. If you like your fantasy on the gritty side, but with anti-heroes who still know how to have fun, this book is worth a read. The characters are clever and their schemes are fun to watch.

The one thing that makes me less than totally glowing in my review is the book's treatment of its female characters. Don't get me wrong - Lynch's heart is clearly in the right place here. There are plenty of badass secondary female characters in the book, and they're badass in pleasantly diverse ways, from tough fighters to wily old ladies. However, the most intriguing female character in this book...never actually appears in the book. There are lots of references to Sabetha, but we never see her. Which serves to create the unfortunate impression that she exists primarily to lend a little tragic romantic backstory to Locke.

The second most intriguing female character gets killed off in order to motivate her much less interesting male relatives to vengeance. Bah.

Still, I hear the next book has a black middle-aged woman pirate, so I shall keep reading.


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Comments

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

I give the female characters a lot of credit for the fact that I could envisage many of them as protagonists if the story had gone a different way. I mean, I would totally read The Amazing Iron-Shod Boots of Nazca Barsavi or Dona Salvara and Dona Vorchenza Fight Crime!. There are a hell of a lot of fantasy novels where if you took the men out of the story, there wouldn't be any interesting people left.

Still, it doesn't say great things about the genre as a whole that that's where my bar for giving credit is.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Maybe that's what rubbed me the wrong way: the sense that there were all kinds of interesting stories that could be told about them . . . but those stories were not this story.

It's a perfectly legitimate thing to say about many stories, but it hits differently when I'm simultaneously going "why did you kill off the most interesting woman I've seen so far and Sabetha's never going to show up, is she."