Red Seas Under Red Skies (Gentleman Bastard, #2) in Sword & Sorcery: "An earthier sort of fantasy"

Apr 04, 2016 Scott Hitchcock rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 5-stars, grimdark

One of the thing Lynch does like no other is set the world or change of venue while still entertaining. There were a few times where I was really surprised at the story direction but he was able to pull it off being such a master story teller. While not a good as the first still a marvelous book.

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Oct 03, 2021 Richard rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fantasy, pirates

Another audio book.

Where I grudgingly liked The Lies of Locke Lamora, I really loved Red Seas Under Red Skies.

A complicated novel about a complicated heist that becomes more and more complicated the more you read. Listening with half an ear, and mostly groggy during my commute, I became lost as to what was actually going on. It didn't take long to regain my handle on the story though.

The story begins with a con. Two years of work and planning are just now paying off. Enter the Archon. Tipped off ...more

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Oct 15, 2017 Ryan Deer rated it liked it

Going into the book, I had heard that Scott Lynch was dealing with depression and had a hell of a time getting this to publishing.

I put that knowledge aside when I started reading the book, instead trying to immerse myself in the story and appreciate his epic world-building that he demonstrated in Lies of Locke Lamora.

Unfortunately, it did feel like he was distracted at times, and I don't think he was ready to swing the urban, thieving crime/con artist novel into a swashbuckling high seas advent ...more

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Jan 31, 2014 Adam McPhee rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy, my-favourite-fantasy-books, nautical

Heist at a high fantasy pirate casino. More imaginative than most fantasy books by far. The stuff that tied into the larger story arc (stuff about being poisoned by a falconry wizard or something?) got kind of tedious. Been a while since I read this. I remember liking the nautical element.

Hope book four gets released eventually.

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Sep 29, 2016 Daniel Millard rated it really liked it · review of another edition

It took me a long time to get through this one, but it certainly wasn't for lack of interest in the story.

I felt that "Red Seas Under Red Skies" was a small but noticeable step up from the first Gentleman Bastard novel in a number of ways, and I definitely enjoyed it more. Lynch really settles in on Locke and Jean as the main characters, making less of an attempt to spend much POV time with other characters, and I feel that this helped character development IMMENSELY. Locke, while still a slimeb It took me a long time to get through this one, but it certainly wasn't for lack of interest in the story.

I felt that "Red Seas Under Red Skies" was a small but noticeable step up from the first Gentleman Bastard novel in a number of ways, and I definitely enjoyed it more. Lynch really settles in on Locke and Jean as the main characters, making less of an attempt to spend much POV time with other characters, and I feel that this helped character development IMMENSELY. Locke, while still a slimebag and having some weirdly conflicting values, is more likable and dynamic this time around, and Jean gets a few emotional sucker punches that really open him up as well. I liked the way that Lynch played up the conflicts between the two and built this up as a plot element early on. While the two are debatably closer than brothers, there remains a lingering doubt about their loyalties to the end of the story, which fuels drama in (finally!) a good way.

I was a little frustrated with the deus ex machina use of the Archon's mysterious female henchwoman, both in her fouling of Locke's plot and her *poof* disappearance practically reminiscent of the cackling bad guy teleporting away from danger in a tabletop RPG when he's on the ropes.

I loved that Lynch built up Tel Verrar as a setting and yet simultaneously established a number of other interesting locales - and the world seemed much more open and interesting than the first novel because of this. I also love me a good nautical adventure, and enjoyed some of the time spent at sea. However, by all outside appearances, Lynch suddenly seemed to say "you know what my book needs? PIRATES. LOTS OF PIRATES" about halfway through. This would be all well and good, except then he proceeded to both rip off Pirates of the Caribbean while simultaneously beginning to trip over genre cliches all over the place (something largely avoided in the first book).

I don't have a problem with any particular ideological agenda that Lynch tries to push in this book, though they are getting more prominent (this doesn't bode well for book three, but here's hoping...). I am still weary of his need for unnecessarily over-the-top profanity, but even this is a bit improved from "The Lies of Locke Lamora".

What was great about this book was the coming together of all its plotlines at the end. Lynch has a gift for creating convoluted, intrigue-laden schemes, and then using third-party scenes and after-the-fact revelations to shed light on how everything came together. I know I had a couple of fun "aha!" moments at the ending of the story, and to be honest, I think I liked the book all the more for Locke and Jean's misfortune at the end. ...more

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May 10, 2015 Seth Skorkowsky rated it liked it

Shelves: audio

I loved The Lies of Locke Lamora. LOVED IT! I loved it so much that I reread it immediately after reading it the first time. I highly doubt I will read any book in the near future that can compare to how much I enjoyed the first Gentleman Bastard books.

Needless to say, my expectations were extremely high for the second book, Red Seas Under Red Skies. I was disappointed, not because it was a bad book, but because I was riding in straight from a book that I loved. My bad.

Red Seas Under Red Skies p I loved The Lies of Locke Lamora. LOVED IT! I loved it so much that I reread it immediately after reading it the first time. I highly doubt I will read any book in the near future that can compare to how much I enjoyed the first Gentleman Bastard books.

Needless to say, my expectations were extremely high for the second book, Red Seas Under Red Skies. I was disappointed, not because it was a bad book, but because I was riding in straight from a book that I loved. My bad.

Red Seas Under Red Skies picks up shortly after the end of Book One. Jean and Locke are working another con. Locke has had to deal with the extreme mental and physical stress left after the end of the first book, and everything seems to be going well for the surviving Gentleman Bastards. And then it all goes terribly wrong. More specifically, the people they crossed in Book 1 are coming for payback.

This in itself is a great setup. The heroes get yanked off course and are fighting to gain the advantage while trying to keep a dozen plates in the air. However, this is where the book begins to suffer.

In the first book, things would go badly and they would sometimes get resolved by getting worse (Locke's arranged engagement being a great example). The frying pan into the fire escalation was exciting. However in Book 2, nothing gets resolved with the escalation. More and more troubles continue to stack, but none of the old troubles go away. This becomes a little too much as Jean and Locke are juggling a massive number of false faces and personas to the point that it becomes very confusing.

Also...Lynch seems to veer off onto strange tangents that go nowhere. The two largest examples are when Locke goes to a town to commission a set of chairs required for the con. The story starts going into detail about the horrible way the nobility and rich treat the poor. Then nothing comes of it. While it was neat world-building, it was a lot of attention spent on complete background stuff that drags the story down. The other big one occurred when Jean and Locke get jumped by a really stupid highwayman. The scene goes on for entirely too long, but concludes with the highwayman "owing them one". Nothing ever comes of it. We never see this guy again. Maybe we'll see him in a later book (he isn't in Book 3) and if he does show again, a flashback at that time might be more suitable than it was in Book 2.

There is one more thing that irritated me about the book, and it's a pet-peeve of mine that I've brought up before (I'm looking at you Stephen King). We have a "terribly mysterious" character that is working behind the scenes against our heroes because their "employer" wants them to. The employer is never named, even when we are in that character's head, they are only referred to as their employer. This is a cheap gimmick that storytellers will use to add mystery and to hook a reader. Most of the time it simply irritates me. I especially hate it when the reader has a dozen hooks and suspenseful things already keeping their interest and having a blatantly "I'm going to taunt you with this mystery. Aren't you curious?" move has the opposite effect on me. Had we not already had so much going on, I might have been intrigued. But here I wasn't.

Now please don't think that I didn't enjoy the book. I honestly did. I enjoyed it quite a lot. I loved the characters. Lynch's clever dialogue is awesome. His world-building is amazing, and there was a point where Locke's luck and clever antics involving a sudden reputation get gets dropping a barrel caused me to laugh so hard that I thought I was going to crash my car listening to it.

Unfortunately, the book was less than the first book. I think he might have had too many ideas going on and threw too much into it. I don't know. But my initial disappointment caused me to hold off on reviewing it for a couple weeks so that I could gather my thoughts and judge the book off of what it was and not off of what I wanted it to be.

...more

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