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Scott Lynch’s The Republic of Thieves.. SPOILERS


Howdyphillip

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I am just a few pages in the book and I am already engrossed and every bit as much in love with Sebetha as Locke Lamora. How perfect that the first time Locke meets the love of his life, she threatens to throw him off a bridge if he doesn't mind his manner.



It is also incredibly nice to be back in Camorr. Even though these are flashback scenes, the return of the Thiefmaker and the setting of the graveyard just feels like slipping on a comfortable shoe. I love these characters.


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I've finished the prologue and first chapter. It's nice to see that Locke and Jean's luck is as bad as ever, and I do like that hook at the end of chapter one. I was afraid that Lynch would gloss over Locke's poisoning from the last book, but that hasn't happened. This is a book I can see myself getting lost in and finishing in a day or two, time permitting.



How long has it been since you last read a book in the series?


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I tried reading the book but gave up after a hundred pages. I need to go back and re-read the previous books. These large gaps between published installments make it really difficult for me, especially as I tend to read so many books in the interim. I think my limit is two years. If the publishing gap exceeds that, then I am forced to do re-reads if I want to continue.


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I liked it. Better than RSURS, found myself engrossed the way I was with the first book.



I guess Sabetha is the woman reborn, now I'm wondering if Locke is the man. But while that part interested me, here's hoping the foreshadowed larger threat ends up being good. I'm not all that invested in the Eldren and what they fled from at this point. Then again, Lynch has a couple more books to build up to it.


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I finished reading it last night. All in all, a pretty good book. I didn't like it as much as the first one, but I think it's better than the second one. Interspersing the two stories together almost works. My only complaint is that the weaving of the two should not be used as a means of creating cliffhangers. I really, really didn't like the point where somebody basically says "I will now tell you a big and important secret"... and then I turn the page to discover that what follows is a chapter of the other story. The transition between stories works best when it happens at a natural break in the action, not when it's interrupting a scene.



The revelation about Locke's potential origin is interesting, although I don't think it was foreshadowed in the previous books beyond the fact that he's special in some way. Of course, it's been a long time so I could be forgetting something. The story and motivation of the Bondsmagi is also interesting. However, I very much doubt we'll see the force the Eldren fled from -- despite the Bondsmagi and the alchemists, the society is quite primitive compared to the ruins that have been mentioned so far and I don't see a reason for a cosmic power will bother with it.



I was also surprised by how vulnerable a high level Bondsmage can be to physical force. I assumed that after some level, they walk around with a better version of the Grey King's shield (can't be cut, can't be pierced) all of the time, but it seems not; all it would really take to kill one is a crossbow bolt to the head. It gives Locke and Jean a chance against their once and future nemesis if they can somehow get the jump on him (of course, the latter is pretty unlikely given that they don't know he's back).



I did get a little bit confused by the ending and reading it again did not help.


What is the relationship of Sabetha to the rogue archmage who Patience claims transmigrated himself into the 6 year old Locke? Can she be his daughter? I am not sure if the ages line up. I need to read it again, but I got the impression there was much more than a decade between his wife's death and his final experiment. Is she some sort of clone of his wife?


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I did get a little bit confused by the ending and reading it again did not help.

What is the relationship of Sabetha to the rogue archmage who Patience claims transmigrated himself into the 6 year old Locke? Can she be his daughter? I am not sure if the ages line up. I need to read it again, but I got the impression there was much more than a decade between his wife's death and his final experiment. Is she some sort of clone of his wife?

This is a spoiler thread, so I'm not spoiler-tagging:

Yes, that was my impression. Patience originally implied that Locke was the mage reborn; but when showing him the portrait at the end, she mentioned the resemblance was remarkable. However, we're then told the man looked nothing like Locke. Implication is that the resemblance to Sabetha is remarkable, that she is the woman brought back to life. In the end, Sabetha was able to get over Locke maybe having been someone else before, but not that she was. That bombshell made her run away.

Locke's own status is not as clear; he may be Lamor Acanthis who body-snatched a kid off the street, rather than going through the full rebirth Sabetha got, or Patience may just be playing with him or be misinformed. We know Lamor Acanthis really existed since the other mages recognize the name, and given the similarity of the names, I think there's some connection there, but the exact connection is somewhat ambiguous.

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Am I the only one who didn't like the revelation about Locke's true nature?



I really kind of liked it when it just an ultimately normal dude against the powers of the world and the bondsmagi, who had no investment in him past the fact that he's the only normaly human alive ever to have defeated and destroyed a Bondsmage and lived to tell the tale.



I dunno. I have a lot of feelings about the book, but I don't want to go into them too much, other then I'm a little confused and don't know what to expect. I'll wait for the next book to decide, but this was easily the worst in the series for me. I hated how the interludes here handled in this one, and the whole main story and particularly the climax were absolutely nothing compared to the incredibly intense and insane climaxes of books 1 and 2.


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I liked the flashbacks. So good to see Calo and Galdo again. :love:



The ending I'm not sure about, but that's the least important thing here really, the joy is in the journey.



But I do reckon that the Elderkillers will start to feature a lot more in subsequent books, if we have Rogue Bondsmage chucking power around unrestrained. Don't really like that device of having the Defeated Bad Guy From Book 1 come back, I prefer an incremental series of bigger villains, but we'll see how that goes.


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This is a spoiler thread MinDonner, no need for spoiler brackets...



I did enjoy seeing them all again, I just found the whole consistent storyline in the flashbacks uninteresting, in a way. I loved the old system; we'd leave at an appropriate break or cliffhanger in the normal story to see a little subsection of the lives of one of the characters, or just as good, a little piece of flavour about the city and surroundings. Each one was usually interesting in it's own right, a little mini-story that wrapped itself up and gave the world and characters infinite flavour. Even better was how Lynch usually tied them in to the main story somehow, either by the actual events that happen in it having a direct effect on the current story (mostly in the second book), or through revealing something about a character that comes to bear in the real story at the same time or showing us an important relationship at a time it is important to us to know it, informing us at the times we need to be informed. It just wove beautifully into the story.



In this book, it was just a totally seperate and removed storyline, with no real relevance aside from showing us Locke and Sabetha, but it didn't do so very, well, efficiently. I feel the whole thing could have been handled much better in the traditional Lynch format. It got to the point where interesting bits in the main story were broken off to a TOTALLY UNRELATED and usually quite long chapter of the alternate story. I mean, with the flashbacks in the previous two books, if you removed them the whole book would be missing something vital and valuable... in this book, you could remove every single flashback and the book would still make sense, would still work without losing much. It feels almost as if the whole Espara storyline should just have been a tiny little seperate novella. Sure, it was great to see Sabetha in action and to see the whole gang, and the Sanzas... but it didn't seem worth it. It wasn't helped by there being virtually nothing in the main story for anything to tie into either.



I dunno. Just, compared to his previous two outings, this one seems a serious drop in quality and complexity. He could have done all the same major things and taken the major storyline all the same places and made the main bulk of the story far more engaging and worthy.


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Yeah, that's what I feel. I'm hoping it was. It just feels so irritatingly standard and boring and stuff to have him have this extra significance and shit...



I mean sure, it's a fine twist and everything, and I can't really think of much against it, but I'm just... hoping, that it's false.


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I felt like this book suffered slightly from an aggregation of several small issues. One, I felt like several points kept getting hammered over and over and over again until it was all I could do to not skip ahead a couple of paragraphs every time I hit one of them, like a tripwire that sent me stumbling through the pages. Yes, Sabetha is angry and mercurial. Yes, Locke is awkward and stubborn, and when they get together these attributes are magnified. Yes, the twins are horndogs. While it may remain true to the character to keep emphasizing those points, I got it the first five times they were fed down my throat.



So this was obviously a slower, more character-driven novel than the first two. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the first two books were really strongly plot-driven, like any good heist- or confidence trick story need to be, and the contrast was really very jarring. The interleaved-flashback structure could have worked very well if, say, the flashbacks were just as slow and character-driven as they are, but the in-the-present portions were faster and more twisty and interesting (which, IMO, they were not). I was hoping for some nitty-gritty, in-depth dirty electioneering, or maybe a really twisty long-con. Instead what we got was what essentially amounts to a prank war, with a couple of really obvious twists telegraphed way in advance and what sadly amount to fairly stock characters filling in the details.



I don't know if this is a valid criticism or not, but this book really, really didn't stand on its own. There are a couple of ways you can structure a series, I suppose, and on a forum dedicated to ASOIAF it seems foolish to complain about one that requires the reader to have thorough knowledge of the previous books to appreciate the current one. On the other hand, I've found episodic adventure series, which this one definitely is, seem to work better with books that can stand on their own individual merits. There's a balance that can be found somewhere in the middle, but I don't think that this book did so. For example, there are many references to the first two books, both oblique and direct -- the poisoning, the fall of the Barsava family, the Falconer's motivations, Bug, etc -- and yet during the flashbacks, we're beaten over the head with the same things that we already covered in depth in the first two books. Locke was SO UNHAPPY as a child before he was adopted by Chains. Chains was a GOOD GUY.



It's almost 3AM and i'm not entirely coherent. I'll revisit this in the morning.


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This book actually left me feeling really morose. I don't know if it's the pointlessness of the electioneering, the complete powerlessness of the protagonists against the bondsmagi, the twist about the past, or the frustration of the Locke/Sabetha relationship and how it ended.



I thought it was a good book and I really want to read the next one, but I think I expected it to be more fun.


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This book actually left me feeling really morose. I don't know if it's the pointlessness of the electioneering, the complete powerlessness of the protagonists against the bondsmagi, the twist about the past, or the frustration of the Locke/Sabetha relationship and how it ended.

Really? I thought this was the most cheerful entry of the series. In the first book, Locke and Jean lose the Sanza twins, Bug, all of their money and their home and Locke's body is subjected to a progression of physical suffering (the vomiting drug, then near-drowning in horse piss, then exhaustion and finally sword wounds). In the second book, Jean's beloved is burned to death, their scheme ends up returning less money than they spent on it and Locke is afflicted with a nearly incurable poison. Here, they're still forced to dance on strings (same as in the other two books), but despite the fact that the Bondsmage cheat them at the end and Sabetha runs away, it can still be argued that they're better off at the end of the book than they were in the beginning (nobody they care about died and Locke is cured of the poison).

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I just finished today. I generally read at a much faster clip, but it has been a fairly busy week at work. I also have the luxury of reading this series back to back for the first time reading this series, and the third book is probably my favorite. Scott Lynch hit the nail on the head describing a complicated relationship. As a person who has been through this, I related to these characters every step of the way. There were just so many layers to the issues between Sabetha and Locke and every one of them immensely relatable for me.



I also work in theatre, so the emphasis on that in the back story was absolutely delightful. Lynch's description of the troupe reminded me so much of people I actually know. I even enjoyed the bits of the play he wrote in the book.



All in all, this was a fantastic journey.


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Blasted through it in two days. Enjoyed the hell out of it, just like everything I've read of Lynch's. Not as good as TLOLL but very few books are. I put it about on par with RSURS, which I enjoyed, though they're very different sorts of books.



Re. Locke's Identity: Probably true, but probably not that meaningful in the grand scheme of things, at least in the details. If Locke can't really remember anything about his past identity, apart from the name he thought was his, then it's not really as though much is different from Locke just being normal. I expect the most meaningful element of that reveal will be that Locke's "red name" is truly lost, likely an important asset against the Bondsmagi, and thus, most critically (it appears), the Falconer.



Re. the redhead from Patience's painting, my suspicion isn't that there's anything truly that weird about the reveal, just that Locke's fixation on redheads, and thus, his latching onto the first redhead he met, is some sort of artifact from his previous consciousness. That is the sort of thing that would likely drive Sabetha away, at least temporarily.



All told I loved it. Loved Lynch's characters, love that he seems constitutionally incapable of writing a non-wiseass (that might sound like a critique, but it's really really not), really liked the Locke/Sabetha relationship, and really liked the flashback storyline in particular (far more cohesive with the previous books' Interludes / Reminiscences). The details behind the election rigging weren't really that interesting (probably the weakest point of the book, just a factor of "rigging an election" being a fundamentally less interesting topic than the one-sentence descriptions of the first two books). But of course the election was just window dressing for the Locke/Sabetha interaction, which to me was a hell of a lot more interesting and believable than the conflict between Locke and Jean that permeated Book 2.



Another thing that seemed to be slipped from relevance was any sort of real dealing with Jean's loss of Ezri past the first act. This probably bugged me more than anything. I know that Jean's different from Locke particularly in how he deals with grief (RSURS proved that since the loss of Calo, Galdo, and Bug was as much Jean's as Locke's), but I felt like Lynch set up that Jean was going to be off his game in Karthain, and then never really followed through.



Anyway, so it looks like the new-and-improved Falconer is going to be the Big Bad, though I wouldn't put it past Lynch to make that a high-level misdirection. Still very interested to see where he takes us. Off to Emberlain!


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About the portait at the end: my guess is that, yes, the redhead is identical to Sabetha, meaning we are supposed to assume that Lamor somehow succeeded in resurrecting his wife, then promptly threw himself in to 6 year old Locke's body. I just don't see why Sabetha would believe it (or if I'm wrong, really believe anything Patience said or showed to her), and take off without even talking to Locke.

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