A Crown for Cold Silver

I have had A Crown For Cold Silver by Alex Marshall on my shelves for some time and was rather intimidated by it’s sheer size. And, indeed, this is not a quick read, but this sprawling fantasy epic grabbed hold of me right from the start with it’s great writing, imaginative plot and superb characters and made this a wonderful immersive reading experience.

There are many characters to follow each with their own distinct viewpoint, but mostly this book is about Zosia, known as Cold Cobalt, the Banshee with a Blade or First Among Villains. She had been the leader of a group of formidable rebels but they had disbanded and were living separate lives until Zosia’s life was overturned, her husband and her village destroyed. After 20 years show more she sets out on a revenge trail and her rebel group once more gather to fight at her side or do they each have their own agenda?

Old grudges, conflicting religious beliefs, imposters, revenge, betrayals and a rather captivating demon dog ignite this story, and the author sprinkles plenty of humor and wry observations along the way. A Crown for Cold Silver was a gritty, dark story with driven, brutal and violent characters that were also engaging and extremely fun to read about. I am looking forward to continuing on with this trilogy. show less

Oh my god. What can I say about this book? Fantasy? Check! A bunch of irreverent, crusty old f*cks that rib each other with every breath as well as not trusting each other as far as they can throw one another? Check! Plots within plots? Hella check. Magic? Oh hells yeah. Demon/devils? Double check. Hilarious and dark and humorous and sarcastic and well written? ALL the checks. Mark it down as one of my favorites. I cannot wait to read more!

Big juicy epic grimdark fantasy about a bandit who conquered an empire, became queen, faked her own death and retired to become mayor of a small village for twenty years. And then our story begins. One quick murder and massacre later and Zosia is back on the warpath, heading off to round up her five old Villains and scrounge up and army and start a war to take down an empire all over again, as you do. Things go as well as you might expect with lies and betrayal and a diverting side-quest to rescue a missing princess, and yet by the time we're halfway through the book, war is pretty much a certainty

Despite its arresting opening, this doesn't quite grab traction as much as it should, not for a while anyway. There's plenty to keep you show more interested, with the worldbuilding and the characters, but it feels loose and sprawly until the multiple narrative strands start to come together in the last two hundred pages or so. Nonetheless it's well-written and not as grindingly, relentlessly grimdark as you might expect. The volume ends just as the world is going definitively to some kind of hell, so one might hope for a tighter, faster, even nastier bit of pandemonium in volume two. show less

I loved the Brothers Grossbart (written under another name) and I loved this in a whole different way. The thing they had in common was amazing writing. It's gritty, the world is fleshed out enough to be interesting without being over-detailed, the characters are amazing and realistically flawed. Some very cool magic going on, I love the devils idea.

Other than all that, I think the thing that makes it the most original is that there's not really a completely obvious plot. The characters in this book don't need to throw the ring into mount doom or find the holy grail, or defeat the dark wizard to save the princess. Most of the characters have some kind of goal that has put them in the situation they're in, but that's not pushing the show more whole story to the end. Instead events are happening, people are dying, there are large political movements taking place in the background, people are betraying each other, but it all seems very "organic".

Can't wait to read the 2nd and 3rd books. My wife has ensured me they're just as good as the first one. show less

‘It was all going so nicely, right up until the massacre.’

A young cavalry officer figures he’ll make a name for himself and make his daddy proud when he leads his soldiers against a small village. He is particularly impressed with the mayor’s house which he will claim for himself after, of course, slaughtering the entire village and killing the mayor’s husband. Next, he will kill her and maybe even her dog – that should be easy. Except the mayor isn’t your average old lady, what look like wrinkles are actually battle scars, and her dog – well, he isn’t really a dog in the usual, um, canine sense. Talk about picking on the wrong person. Because the mayor of this small village is actually Cold Zosia, she of song and show more legend, thought dead for two decades, who with her Five Villains, once led a rebel army against the Crown and won it only to seemingly die in a fall over a cliff during a duel for that crown. Now she’s out for revenge and she won’t stop until she gets it.

If you’ve read any reviews of A Crown for Cold Silver by author Alex Marshall, the phrase ‘trope-bending’ gets repeated a lot and there’s certainly plenty of that – there’s gender-bending eg duels between women for the crown and men in arranged same-sex marriages; women tend to be the dominant sex when it comes to positions of power like Crown, Pope, or General; Zosia and her Villains are a great deal older than your average young hero or heroine and way more cunning; and the one guy who seems to have all the traits of the usual hero, honour, loyalty, etc, is the least respected. It’s been called grimdark and there’s certainly aspects of this but, at the same time, it’s more positive than your average grimdark fantasy; and when it comes to the big battle (there’s always a big battle), things don’t exactly go the normal way of these things. But it is really the world-building, the complexity of the plot and the characters, and the dark humour that kept me up at night reading.

One caveat though: there’s a lot of cussing and violence so, for anyone who is offended by four-letter words, violence, or, for that matter, gender fluidity, this will probably not be the book for you. For others, a definite big Yes from me! show less

So yeah.

I went into this warily. A lot of ~mercenary fantasy~ nowadays is so try-hard and often fails to be casually humorous/clever and blithely bloody.

Well...my wariness was completely unjustified. I had as swell a time reading this as I did any of the early Black Company volumes or God's War or Best Served Cold. The world-building could have been done lazily and I still would have enjoyed this for the characters and dialogue. The world-building, however, was also pretty damn awesome. Some familiar concepts, but also a lot of new ones. The Wildborn (a race w generally human characteristics but with a variety of animal features like horns or forked tongues), some flipped-on-its-head Satanism as the main imperial religion (inverted show more crosses used as religious symbols and a Black Pope and the Fallen Mother FANTASTIC), arranged same-sex political marriages with the use of surrogates, genderfluid nobles, a 50 year-old bisexual female anti-hero protagonist and a couple of multi-dimensional female "villains". And that's just half the stuff I wanted to list.

Still plenty of interesting questions rolling around after I finished the last page and I can't wait for the next book.

Anyways, I have no idea how this hasn't been on more HIGHLY ANTICIPATED FANTASY BOOKS OF 2015 lists, but as soon as more review copies drop, it should be.

So. Damn. Good. show less

I like the sub-genre of grimdark fantasy. Right now I don't think anyone is doing a better job of it than Joe Abercrombie. I had heard a lot of early positive things about A Crown for Cold Silver. I was looking forward to getting my hands on it and seeing how it compares. The good news is the book is quite enjoyable and introduces some really interesting twists to the genre. The bad news is that it starts a little slow and the author made some stylistic choices that were a little rough for me.

The story starts many years after Cobalt Zosia and her five villains have conquered the Crimson Empire only to be overthrown themselves. Cobalt Zosia is believed dead and the five villains have scattered around the empire to lick their wounds. The show more only problem is someone claiming to be Zosia is stirring up the shit again. The five villains begin the long trek to find this new Zosia and see who the hell she is and what the fuck she is up to.

I liked the basic plot. It wasn't anything particularity new to the genre but it did have some nice twists. One of the best parts of the book is how Alex Marshall plays with gender. That alone was almost worth reading the book. I was also a huge fan of the devils and loved that people ate bugs as their drug of choice. The story starts slow, but about 100 pages in Marshall starts applying gentle pressure to the accelerator and the book begins to build to a giant battle where nothing turns out the way you think it might.

The world building is great in the novel. It was definitely a playground I want to return to. Despite its length, I felt there were a lot of little mysteries left lying around. I can't wait to see where they go in the next book. Marshall can also write a fight scene but remember this is grimdark so heads will be flying and curse words will be spewed. One of the most surprising aspects of the book for me was how funny it was. There were plenty of laugh out loud moments nestled in between all that blood.

There were a few things that worked against the story but they were not book killers for me. The world building and introduction of the characters in the beginning of the book was a tiny bit slow. I think some of the characters could have been introduced later or some of the world could have been left a mystery. There were some interesting style choices in the writing also. Some of the language felt like it was plucked right out of the real world. Sometimes this worked and sometimes it felt a little awkward. It's hard to describe. It just seemed to pop off the page and make me think about it. It was distracting but it didn't happen often. I also felt a few of the characters were a little been there done that. Marshall was clearly trying to bring something new to the table, which I believe he succeeded at many times. So whenever I ran into a character that felt fantasy 101 I was a little put off.

The small things did not stop me from enjoying it though. I will gladly pick up the second book (especially since this one basically left off with a giant cliff hanger). While not as good as Abercrombie or Scott Lynch it was worth the read. Block out some time and dig into this monster. Bring some safety goggles though, it gets a little messy.


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This book was a review copy provided by Orbit Books. show less