The Dagger and the Coin - Daniel Abraham

[Alex]

Anyone else reading this? Supposed to be five books total, and the third just came out. Book one is The Dragon's Path, book two is The King's Blood, book three is The Tyrant's Law.

I really wanna put these even with Abercrombie's books. George Martin and Pat Rothfuss are worlds better, Brandon Sanderson is just a little better most of the time, and most other fantasy is way worse. Abraham is better than Abercrombie at worldbuilding and fleshing the setting and characters out, but not as good at getting the reader emotionally invested. He's trying hard not to make cookie-cutter characters but in their middle-groundness they aren't very likeable. You find yourself having difficulty caring as much about the POV characters and just feeling a distance (the absolute worst character for this is Geder, it's so bad it brings down the whole work and makes me consider not continuing sometimes).

At the core is Cithrin the brilliant teen banker girl and Marcus the tough old mercenary. They're both POV characters they should be in different geographic places to further the narrative, and the problem is that their constant parting feels forced and clumsy and removes the immersion. I think "the Dagger and the Coin" is about how Abraham wants the readers to think of this as a new/different kind of fantasy, following a banker as a main protagonist and thus not really having battles/action there - showing a different kind of heroism that is slightly more modern. This is actually a great idea, but almost no trade/banking is explored at all or anything really new to fantasy. Instead we just have emotional angst of a teen girl and dialogue/intrigue with no action.

I'm probably not really selling these books, but as I said above I think they're pretty good overall and have been flying through them when they come out. I think this is turning complainy because I want to like them so much more and it would be pretty easy to fix the flaws. In the setting, there are like a dozen countries and a dozen 'races'. The dragons (who are now ancient history) used to rule all humans as slaves in an empire, and the dragons altered humans for their own pet projects (so all the races originate as humans but have genetic modifications). Since the dragons have been gone for so long, now there are just the different races interacting in a chaotic world.

[Coldbird-Raxee]

I've been reading these and they're overall good, but in the second book Cithrin is rapidly turning into a Mary Sue and functionally acting as the writer's mouthpiece on how he pretty clearly thinks the investment banking and insurance industries are actually the only reason civilization exists.