Breakaway Books

Authored by Christopher Buehlman; Published 2021; Fantasy

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

The Blacktongue Thief is in the vein of epic fantasy of Lord of the Rings: a band of heroes journeying together across the countryside on a quest. This is not my favorite type of fantasy, but Blacktongue had a few things going for it.

The Blacktongue Thief follows the eponymous thief, Kinch, whose debts force him on a long journey to complete a mysterious assignment for the thieves’ guild. Along the way, he encounters Galva, a knight set on finding her queen, and Norrigal, a witch’s apprentice, and the three ultimately travel toward Galva’s queen in hopes of securing a more just ruler (Galva) and freedom from the guild (Kinch).

First and foremost, the way magic was cast and portrayed in this book was (no other way to say it) very cool. I loved the way that tattoos were used as a type of one-time spell, and the lore around goblins was new to me at least. Fairies and vampires have become much more commonplace than the vicious goblins. Norrigal, though, was an easy favorite for me with her witchy powers.

Kinch made the journey lively with his first-person narration and easy sense of humor suffusing even the most tense of moments, and I found myself laughing with him at the absurd situations that the band found themselves in. I liked his self-deprecating comments and his growing devotion to the misfits he traveled with.

For me, though, I felt like starting this book was diving into a story halfway through. I don’t love when authors choose to begin this way, and as I scrambled to understand the world I was inhabiting, I struggled to connect with the characters. Ultimately, though, the plot just had less action than I’m used to in a fantasy book. Call me a victim of short attention span.

The Blacktongue Thief is a good quest novel—I don’t love that subgenre of fantasy, but if you do, you will enjoy it!