Many authors have tried this whole anti-hero 'thing'. Anti-heroes are not perfect, they are dark and flawed but they achieve greatness in spite of themselves and you end up falling in love with them. I end up hating these characters. However Mark Lawrence has created Jorg who is a murderer and all round asshole. He kills and pillaged from the innocent. But I end up liking him. He is fourteen and aim to be king by fifteen. As you continue reading you gain an understanding of who he is and why he acts the way he does.

This quote nails it pretty good: "Psychopathy (noun) definition: a personality disorder characterized by diminished empathy and remorse, and disinhibited or bold behavior. See also: Jorg Ancrath" (source) Beautiful writing, fits the story and kept me on my toes for every second! One of the best written antiheroes I've came across so far. A brutal medieval (post apocalyptic) world is the stage for a broken-beyond-saving, twisted, amoral monster of a main lead. I wasn't sure about Jorg, till Chapter 27 did it for me. A lot of characters are one dimensional but that's alright because it doesn't affect the plot in any way. I didn't pay much attention to the remarks about rape and violence in this trilogy, since it is a plot device that drives the narrative forward, but has no actual relevance to the story. It just paints the worldly circumstances that pave the way the characters take. And just imagine! It doesn't even matter what gender the victim has, because contrary to the outrages considering violence against women in PoT, it's evenly balanced. Since assaults against men are quite as frequent. The moral bar in that matter is canting. The first POV is a great approach and pulls the reader in immediately! I loved the plot twists and the pace and couldn't predict anything that happened. It was exiting. Looking forward to the second & third parts.

Having read The Book of the Ancestor series last year and absolutely l loved them, I was hesitant to read The Broken Empire. Tried was because I was lead to believe that BOA was a step up from BE. So I assumed I would be disappointed. What clicked with me and made me take the plunge was reading that Mark Lawrence based Jorg, our brutal protagonist on Alex from Anthony Burges' A Clockwork Orange. I had also heard that the reason why people didn't consider it as good as BOA was that they couldn't connect to study a horrible protagonist. It would be interesting to know, had I read Prince of Thorns without knowing this tidbit of trivia, whether I would have fallen into the trap of misunderstanding this book as others had. But I do definitely feel that this knowledge greatly enhanced my understanding and therefore enjoyment of the book. I would even go as far as saying I might even like it better than BOA, and that's saying something!

You really have to be open minded enough to read about a little psychopath to enjoy this book. Reading this doesn’t always feel good, Jorg really is a terrible person, but he’s also pretty interesting. With most socio- or psychopaths, or whatever he is, in literature, they are presented as charming, intelligent and very much in control, and while Jorg is educated and mostly gets things done, he has also a more immature side to him where his feelings, anger and insecurities get to him. While there are no redeeming qualities to him, I was still kinda rooting for him and his feelings also influenced my opinions on other characters. I loved the writing style. It was somewhat pretty, old-fashioned and almost poetic, but still managed to portray the grittiness of what’s going on while staying surprisingly straight forward. There isn’t any time lost in irrelevant descriptions. The great thing about the plot was that there isn’t just one mission or plot threat that this is following the whole way through. First, there are the flashbacks that give the story more depth and are also really interesting, but than the main plot shifts from time to time with Jorg going different places and almost reevaluating what he does. While there are twists that I really appreciate, the plot isn’t the strongest part of the book, the exploration is: of Jorg´s character, the power dynamics but especially of the setting. There is so much you slowly learn over the cause of the book. Getting little pieces of this world and putting them together was my favourite part of this experience.