Book Review: King of Thorns by Mark Lawrence ★★☆☆☆

To reach greatness you must step on bodies. I’ll win this game of ours, though the cost of it may drown the world in blood…

A six nation army marches toward Jorg's gates, led by a shining hero determined to unite the empire and heal its wounds. Every omen says he will. Every good king knows to bend the knee in the face of overwhelming odds, if only to save their people and their lands. But King Jorg is not a good king.

Faced by an enemy many times his strength, Jorg knows that he cannot win a fair fight. But playing fair was never part of Jorg’s game plan...




Yo, King Joffrey is at it again!

“A Dark time comes.

My time. If it offends you.

Stop Me.”

Jorg made it as a prince in book one of the Broken Empire series, so how on earth did he make it as King Jorg Ancrath? You tell me because this book was an emotional draining blur. This was a long and painful read.

Although I did not like PoT on for many reasons, I had forgotten about the events of book one and so, I had no idea what was going on half of the time. It was only when I took a sneak peek about ‘the story so far’ section in the third book did I get my head around the concept of this middle book. Much like the first book, I had my issues with erratic narrative timelines often felt disjointed and rambling. A few chapters plunge you into the present day and then you’re off in a flashback scene. It exhausts me, so you have to have a higher level of commitment and focus for this book.

“There is no sound more annoying than the chatter of a child, and none more sad than the silence they leave when they are gone.”

My heart not fully engaged on this murdering man. Apart from his abhorrent personality, he always finds a way to get himself out of sticky situations. Unbelievable! He’s like an invincible character game that won’t go away and has sheer amounts of luck. How or where did he acquire such magic? Don’t know, don’t care.

That said, I have to admit Jorg was tolerable in this book and that’s down to Lawrence’s beautiful prose and philosophy themes.

“We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.”

Beautiful, until you come across that scene - an innocent dog torture scene of Jorg’s favourite pet named Justice. Yes, it was brutal to a point of sickening but it wasn’t used as a shock factor and was put in to move the plot and give the reasons behind Jorg motivation. 

“In the end though, everybody dies, but not everybody lives—the climber, though he may die young, will have lived.”

In summary, just skip this one. You’ll save time, plus Lawrence does a recap in book three, so basically, I wasted my time reading this one. 

Right well, I hope book three is better and then I can finally end and bury this saga.

Rating: 2/5
Publishers: Harper Voyager
Publication date: April 25th 2013 (first published August 2012)
Genre: dark epic and high fantasy