Brent Weeks always writes incredible stories that are immensely complex and tangled, with characters that are never clear cut and all the more amazing. As a reader I am continually sucked into his worlds, thrown about by the story, and left to crawl my way out the other side a changed person! He is just such an amazing story teller.
When I first saw the theme for this month in the book club I thought my sister was insane. Not only did she want me to read a 500 page book, and near the end of the month since last month took me so long to get through, but she wanted me to read 2! Then I began panicking because I didn't think that I owned a book with 500 pages! Of course my husband had to prove me wrong, pointing out The Black Prism sitting on our already read shelf from when he had made his way through it a while back. I groaned but agreed because it met the theme and I had read Brent Weeks' Night Angel Trilogy and loved it. But 2 things I didn't take into account when I agreed. 1) This is a trilogy, all three books 600ish pages, and we owned all three. Once I had read the first two for the book club I was going to have to read the third to be satisfied. So I was challenging myself a little more. 2) I forgot how Weeks affects me! With The Night Angel Trilogy I spent days in withdrawals, that shaking, all thought consuming, mind fog you get when you finish a series that changes your life. I couldn't stop talking about it, drawing my husband into conversations repeatedly because I hadn't been able to get over some aspects of the story. (Mostly because one terrifying thing Brent Weeks does with accuracy, not everyone gets a happy ending. A fact that has me terrified for this series!) Weeks after putting the book down saw me reeling a friend into a rabid conversation when he noticed the omnibus on my shelf. All this I have to look forward to because after just finishing the first book I know I am going to loose sleep over the possible outcomes of characters I am already far too invested in. I clutched the open pages to my chest no less than five times over the course of one page near the end! There will be no hope for me at the end of this trilogy and I hope my friends survive my inevitable rantings and ravings!
Ok, so The Black Prism takes us into a world where people regularly have magic manifesting in their ability to turn colors into objects. Think of the Green Lantern with the full rainbow. The magic isn't in everyone and those with it can have it to varying degrees, only able to handle one color to multiple ones. Then there is the Prism, the one guy in a generation who can control all the colors, using the light each day to help balance out the world of color and serving as a type of priest between the people and the god they worship, Orholam. Only, sixteen years ago Orholam decided to pick two Prisms, brothers, and this spurned a war. In the aftermath, sixteen years later, the world is still slightly off balance and people are still affected by everything that occurred. Not the least of which is the Prism, Gavin Guile, who bares the greatest affects and consequences of the actions of him and his brother.
What ensues is a winding tale following a few selected characters, none of which I will name or how they are important because there is just too much and you need to discover stuff for yourself for the greatest effect! Weeks always does a great job of looping, threading, entangling story-lines for the reader to slowly follow and discover news in ways that always leaves me gasping even though I kinda almost half expected it in the back of my mind already. And of course his characters are never as simple as the Hero and the Villain. Hell they aren't even as simple as the Hero and the Anti-hero. Even the Hero is sure he is a monster but just maybe he is a better monster than the other possible monster, but he can't be sure of it. Oh so much chaos! And I am only done with the first book!
So I am going to pick up the next one tomorrow. I am already kicking myself for thinking I wouldn't finish this one before I went home from our stay-cation at a friend's house because I could already be a hundred pages in! Anyway, expect the next review soon because Weeks has sucked me in and there is no escape until I have made my way through as quickly as possible! Pick this book up! Join me in the madness! You'll love every minute of it with this incredible story-telling!
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