Completed: The Hawk And His Boy (The Tormay Trilogy #1) by Christopher Bunn

Originally published November 20, 2011 on Tumblr


Never have a felt this conflicted about a book.
It’s not bad… the characters are interesting and the world seems to have some interesting rules established…. there was even a line that said something like “i put all my will into this word” and maybe it’s just a coincidence but it reminded me of David eddings which always brings a smile to my face…

but…. it’s not good…. i mean it’s well written but the pacing is atrocious. not the worst i’ve seen but not far from it.

we start this tale with our “Main character” Jute, a young boy who works as a thief (considering his age a fairly talented one) and doesn’t remember much about his early childhood. He has been hired to help a man known as “The Knife” retrieve a box from an old scholars house. the place is heavily warded with magic but he is fairly good at tricking the wards into thinking there is no threat.
the knife is too large to fit down the chimney so he sends the boy into the house alone with explicit instructions.

“do not open the box or i’ll slit your throat”

Jute, being a child, is scared shitless by this and tries to do as told.
of course…. we wouldn’t have much of a story if he didn’t open the box…. to be fair it wasn’t his fault…. the box opened at his touch… revealing a knife…. which jute touches and draws a little blood. anyways he closes it, brings it back up and promptly gets poisoned and pushed back down the chimney by the knife… yeah that wasn’t obvious from the start of this mission.
anyways jute manages to wake up and he’s being cared for by the men he just robbed… well one of the men… Severan never really cared about the box while Nio is about ready to tear the boy into small pieces.

Eventually Nio tries to get his wish and tortures the boy with a magical creature which is a mix of both water and darkness. Jute manages to escape with help from a random voice he is now able to hear. unfortunately he had to escape ghrough a sewer drain…. while injured…
anyways he washes up on the shore and after stumbling around town half dead and starved Severan finds him. during the time of jutes escape he found out about the creature nio summoned and brings jute to the university, which is heavily booby trapped, thinking that the magic creature wont find him and the thieves guild that thinks jute dead wont suddenly find him alive.

Jute manages to figure that the voice he’s been hearing belongs to a hawk, it tells him to not let anyone know that he opened the box and to trust no one. When jute is fed and rested he decides to wander around the dangerous university…. nearly gets himself killed then heads back to his room where Severan is waiting.

he is then told of the story of the… and i will spell this wrong…. i don’t care to open the book and get the proper spelling…. anbourne… and how each of them had possession of a single word for each element that held immense power…. the water one nearly destroying the person writing the original tale just for thinking about it.

During this story severan notices jutes eyes have an odd silver sheen in this lighting…. oh well probably not important. Here jute learns that Nio and in fact everyone else couldn’t open the box no matter how hard they tried… this of course gave jute more questions then answers.

Meanwhile~

the person who was the one who asked for the job to get the box arrives…. and is pissed… he/it knows the box was opened and is willing to give all the gold in the known world if the one who opened it is brought back alive…. through some expository dialogue  the group of theives figures out that Jute may not be dead after all….

the pacing of that probably didn’t seem too bad… maybe a bit lackluster in the fact that nothing happens till the end…. but the thing is i just gave the massively abridged versions.

i put main character in quotation marks because out of nearly 40 chapters…. jute probably gets around 7… the others are dedicated to the knife (who seems a little whimpy at point to have such a scary title… even getting beaten up by a child)…. Nio as he slowly descends into darkness (which would be interesting if i cared about him, i think he also get the most and/or the longest chapters… but he’s the bad guy….) a man known as “the silent man” he is the knife’s boss and gets about 2 chapters…. he’s mentioned a lot but otherwise just kinda there. and Lavoreth… who has (at this current moment in time) no connection to the other characters at all OTHER then the fact that she can talk to animals and seems to be the reincarnation of the first Lavoreth in her line.

Now i should clarify that i love stories with a heavy emphasis on character and i love jumping around to different characters perspectives…. but the main character should get the most screen time or at least the most interesting arc. if felt like what i described as the synopsis should have taken no more then half of the book. yes it’s important to establish the other characters… i have no issue with that i’m just saying jute should have done more in this book… he should have learned more about his new power and should have had to use it against that water dark thing thats chasing him… and yeah… technically he does in one scene to run away but i think he needed to try and fight it.

despite how negative i sound i will probably finish the other two books in this series eventually… the story isn’t bad at all just the first one had some pacing problems… the other two have good ratings so who knows… but i will read something in between…. wonder if Aaron Pogue’s new book is out…..