{"id":1173,"date":"2011-02-25T11:44:35","date_gmt":"2011-02-25T15:44:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2011\/02\/25\/read-this-the-heroes\/"},"modified":"2011-02-25T11:44:35","modified_gmt":"2011-02-25T15:44:35","slug":"read-this-the-heroes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2011\/02\/25\/read-this-the-heroes\/","title":{"rendered":"Read This: The Heroes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image1172\" src=\"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/the-heroes-cover.jpg\" alt=\"the-heroes-cover.jpg\" align=\"right\" \/><a href=\"http:\/\/shelf-awareness.com\/issue.html?issue=1401#m11540\" target=\"_blank\">My latest review for <i>Shelf Awareness<\/i><\/a> is a look at Joe Abercrombie&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.powells.com\/partner\/29017\/biblio\/0316044989\" target=\"_blank\"><i>The Heroes<\/i><\/a>, an epic fantasy novel that&#8217;s equal parts J.R.R. Tolkien and Steven Pressfield. Or, to paraphrase my own opening line, if Sam Fuller had ever made a sword epic, it would have looked a lot like this.<\/p>\n<p>Like Fuller&#8217;s war movies, <i>The Heroes<\/i> is a profoundly unsentimental look at combat: Before the fight begins, (nearly) everybody jockeys for the position they think will bring them the most glory; once the swords come out, everyone just scrambles to stay alive. The particulars of this conflict are almost beside the point, although Abercrombie <i>does<\/i> do a fantastic job of outlining a complex political scenario underpinning the battle between the fragile alliance of chieftains under Black Dow and the advancing Army of the Union. As I suggest in my review, Abercrombie may be drawing on a lot of historical parallels here&#8212;in particular, I think American readers may find echoes of the Civil War&#8212;but the novel&#8217;s strength lies in the ability to create an entirely new reality out of those real-world influences. <i>The Heroes<\/i> depicts no war you&#8217;ve ever seen, but you will believe that this is how people like these characters would behave in circumstances like this&#8212;and that, to me, is a mark of truly great fiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My latest review for Shelf Awareness is a look at Joe Abercrombie&#8217;s The Heroes, an epic fantasy novel that&#8217;s equal parts J.R.R. Tolkien and Steven Pressfield. Or, to paraphrase my own opening line, if Sam Fuller had ever made a sword epic, it would have looked a lot like this. Like Fuller&#8217;s war movies, The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}