Listened to the audiobook with Ben Elliot. Well narrated.

Because Half a King was such easy listening, I rolled straight into its sequal Half the World after, half expecting the story to focus on Yarvi and politics at the courts of Thorlby and Skekenhouse.

Instead, Half the World introduces a whole new set of characters and launches into a whole new story that is connected to Half a King but is really not a continuation of the same story, other than featuring some of the same characters.

In how it treated these characters, it reminded me of Earthsea, which also shifts the main characters of each previous book into the background for the next instalment in the series.

Half the World is a travel story, taking a crew through an arduous journey to a distant destination and back again, seeing places, meeting kings and emperors, making new friends and enemies and meeting old friends and enemies along the way.

It focuses on the character of a girl who wants to be a warrior. And while I did enjoy reading about her, the story is not particularly original. I think the book’s main let-down is that she doesn’t appear to develop much as a character. It is another indication that these are story-driven adventure books, with interesting but not necessarily deep characters and not a lot of drive to innovate.

One element of the book that could perhaps have been innovative is the post-apocalyptic aspect of the world, which is pretty much confirmed in Half the World. But it doesn’t really appear as if Abercrombie is interested in developing that aspect of the world. As a result, it can feel a little like an immersion breaker – ‘oh right, he had this post-apocalypse going on, I wonder what he is going to do with that’. I wonder whether it will play more of a role in Half a War.

Interestingly, when I thought Half the World had more or less ended and completed the hero’s journey cycle (which, again, was a little obvious), there was about a quarter of the book left to go. This added quarter at the end of the book has a couple of awkward moments that I feel might have better been carried over to a sequel. On the other hand, these scenes nicely set the stage for Half a War and also give the book a little unpredictable twist that is not unwelcome for the series.

Overall, I think the adventure and story in Half the World was enjoyable and I think the journey from the pseudo-Baltic down the pseudo-Dnieper to pseudo-Byzantium was a great setting.

I’m already a good way into Half a War, which I think tells you all you need to know!