Review: Red Country by Joe Abercrombie SPOILERS!!

Red Country by Joe Abercrombie
Published by Gollancz on November 13, 2012
ISBN: 9780316214445
Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Epic, Action & Adventure, Westerns
Pages: 300
Format: Paperback
Source: Purchased Book
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A New York Times bestseller!They burned her home.They stole her brother and sister.But vengeance is following.
Shy South hoped to bury her bloody past and ride away smiling, but she'll have to sharpen up some bad old ways to get her family back, and she's not a woman to flinch from what needs doing. She sets off in pursuit with only a pair of oxen and her cowardly old step father Lamb for company. But it turns out Lamb's buried a bloody past of his own. And out in the lawless Far Country the past never stays buried.
Their journey will take them across the barren plains to a frontier town gripped by gold fever, through feud, duel and massacre, high into the unmapped mountains to a reckoning with the Ghosts. Even worse, it will force them into an alliance with Nicomo Cosca, infamous soldier of fortune, and his feckless lawyer Temple, two men no one should ever have to trust . . .
Red Country takes place in the same world as the First Law trilogy, Best Served Cold, andThe Heroes. This novel also represents the return of Logen Ninefingers, one of Abercrombie's most beloved characters.

Red Country for me anyway, was a bit of a departure for the First Law Series.  I was very excited at the prospect of a western type fantasy novel but it fell flat.  Why do you ask?  Firstly, it was slow as all hell.  I understand that a new novel based in an entirely new area needs build-up but it just failed to grasp my imagination, unlike, the previous novel, The Heroes.  Also, Abercrombie is renowned for his stellar characterisations, but, one character, in particular, Cosca ended up falling, it isn’t what was expected from him. He ended up turning a bit sociopathic and child-killing is something I thought that even he was incapable of.

Also and bear with me if this sounds a little bit on the strange side but this is literally how I feel.  I felt Abercrombie tried too hard to make it a tad too Tolkein-ish, with the idea of the fellowship and the “dragon.”  Now I also love me some Shivers.  I’ve enjoyed his presence immensely in each book especially in the previous one BUT things aren’t quite adding up for me.  Part of Shivers’ entire identity was the wrongs that had been done to him by the Bloody Nine.  He has gone between letting the past stay buried and wanting to settle the score once and for all.  It never really seemed like he had come to the resolution that we saw at the end of the book it just seemed to be a useless build-up for it to be concluded that way.

What was amazing was the fact that Logen was back!  Yeah but Joe Abercrombie didn’t put his name in the text once, but the references were there, the infamous “you’ve got to be realistic about things.”  I loved having his insight again and both he and Shy made a great team. 

I liked Red Country but I didn’t love it.  It felt a lot longer than it needed to be, the plot sounds very intriguing but it wasn’t executed particularly well, in my opinion.  The world-building was good but I did struggle to imagine everything. 

“Better to have steel to hand and find no trouble than find yourself in trouble with no steel to hand.”