The Blinding Knife Review

I realized there was a bit of a gap a few month ago, where I was reading books, but not reviewing them. I'm going to try to catch up with that, though my memory might not be perfect. First up, The Blinding Knife by Brent Weeks!

This is the second book in the Lightbringer series. Weeks is actually one of my favorite authors, right behind Sanderson, but unfortunately he's only written a few books. Even though it seems to take forever for each book to come out, the read is well worth the wait. Weeks forte is in characterization and voice. Each of his characters are distinct and strong, even down to the smallest character. It's through his characters that the world and the history is revealed, along with moving the plot along.

The book itself has a very creative idea. The magic system is based off of colours. Certain people can use one, two, three, sometimes even four or more colours to create things. Each colour has a different property, some creating more solid structures, some being purely liquid. Which of course means that each are used as a different weapon. However, for someone to use this colour, they first have to have the ability, and they have to have access to something of that colour. If someone wanted to use red, they would have to be looking at something red, like a red cloth or something. If someone uses their colour for too long and too much, it starts to drive them mad, called 'Breaking the halo', which is just the colour in their eyes bleeding into the whites of their eyes.

Now the plot rotates around someone called The Prism, who can use all the colours in the spectrum, and if I remember correctly, he doesn't need to be looking at a colour to use it. A war is breaking out between the regular colour users, and the ones that have broken their halo and gone insane. Normally those that have broken the halo would be killed before they went insane, but now they're fighting back for their freedom to live after.

You can see the complexity, and that's just the very basic. The book is marvelously written so that the reader is never confused. My descriptions cannot do it justice.