 What's up guys, my name is Glassfoot, and today I'm going to be talking about Red Seas Under Red Skies, the second book in the Gentleman's Bastard Sequence by Scott Lynch. This book takes place two years after the events of The Lies of Lachlanmore, the consequences of the end of that book with what they did and how the plot resolved itself, catching up to them in modern times. The book starts out towards the end of the book, and when I say that I mean the literal first couple of paragraphs of the book are something that happens very close to right before the climax of the book, and you're left wondering what the hell is going on up until the book catches up and tells you what is occurring. I personally liked that because it kept me invested and wanting to keep going with the book, even at the parts where it was kind of dragging because I was like, I need to know what this freaking paragraph means. So I personally enjoyed that. Now the plot of this book basically revolves around Lach and Jean, and minor spoilers I'm not going to get too heavily into the plot here because I don't want to ruin things, but Lach and Jean get coerced into helping someone trying to start a war and are forced to go into a situation they know almost nothing about because otherwise bad things will happen. That's the most descriptive I can be without getting into spoilers. I'm sorry if you wanted more, that's about all I can do for you. So Lach and Jean are now forced to try and go on a ship to start this conflict so they don't die, and then things happen from there. A good half of this book is bad things happen to Lach and Jean continuously. The book starts out with them running a game that they've been running for pretty much two years, and then they get coerced into doing the thing, and then their entire plan goes out the windows in like two weeks once they actually get going. They get screwed a lot in this book, and it is actually one of the funniest things to be how often their plans go wrong because, again, once again, as I said in the last review, Lach is such a forward-thinking character and likes to plan everything out. When things go this wrong for him, it's really funny because he's like, ah, shit. I will say I feel really, really bad for Jean in this book. When the book starts out, Jean's dealing with Lach on his bullshit because Lach feels bad about what happened to the rest of the crew in the whole Great King situation from the last book. So Jean has to deal with that, and then Jean becomes incredibly happy at one point in the book. Like, as soon as it happened, I was like, they're gonna rip this away from Jean, and I don't want that to happen. My beautiful butt! Jean is probably my favorite character within the Gentleman Bastard sequence so far, mostly because he is the best friend. I will never let anything bad happen to you as long as I live, type of person. And for me, that resonates fairly decently because I am pretty much the same way with my best friends. I would rather get hurt myself than let them get hurt doing whatever they're going to do. That and the fact that Jean and I are both basically the same as brawlers doesn't hurt anything either. The characters. In this book, Lach and Jean return as Lach being the extremely forward-thinking, crafty plan. I'm not gonna tell you what is truly going on if I don't have two characters with Jean as his bruising, beating buddy who's also actually fairly decently smart. How to not say this spoiler. At one point, Jean starts actually proving that he's very forward-thinking like Lach and able to do things though he does use a little more matter-over-mind approach as opposed to the mind-over-matter approach for the most part. He's still very smart. Jean is a very intelligent character. He just doesn't have the imagination or forward-thinking capabilities that Lach has to be able to come up with everything the way that Lach does. About other characters in this book, you've got Requin, the dude that they've been playing a game on, the Archon of Talvra, the guy who's running the city that they are in, and then you've got Zemiro Drakasha, the captain of the ship that the characters end up on at one point in the book along with Esri. I only remember her name is Esri. Esri is the first mate to Drakasha. A lot of this book actually takes place at sea with a lot of piracy being at its center, which I actually personally really enjoyed. For me it was really cool to see Lach and Jean in this situation that they were uncomfortable with because they know almost nothing about ships or seafarer or anything like that. So the fact that they were in this situation having to pretend they knew what the hell they were talking about was fairly entertaining to me. I don't know how much that would be to other people, but for me I personally really enjoyed that. I think the biggest thing that got me was the references to Starbird and Larbird. I have no idea if that's a British terminology, but my dad has retired Coast Guard. I've grown up around boats, so in my mind and how I know them it's Starbird and Port. So hearing it called Larbird was very confusing to me, though you could chalk that down to the fantasy world that the General Ambassador sequence takes place in as it being the terminology there. And actually one of my favorite things is at the very end of the book, Scott Lynch wrote this thing that said, I did my best with the terminology used in this book, but I either changed it because of the world that exists or as the excuse of all authors everywhere I didn't know, which I thought was an absolutely godsend level answer to, hey if I fucked up, I don't care. This book also brings back the past, future, and interchanging chapters, but only for the first about, I want to say eight or so chapters I think, that sounds about right. Because it's only a two year gap before we see Locke and Jean again in Red Seas under Red Skies, there's not as much for them to go over in interlude type chapters. In this book they are called Reminescence. I think there's one or two that takes place well back, kind of to explain a little bit more about chains and how he raised them, but for the most part they take place at about six month interval with Locke and Jean setting up this game, getting better. And I was personally disappointed when those ended, I actually really liked them in the first book because I thought it was a very interesting concept. Just to keep going back and forth between the two and you just learn more about the characters and a little more backstory as you went on without it feeling exposition dumpy with characters talking about their past to each other. But I do understand why it wasn't used continuously in this book because that would be very fairly awkward if it just kept occurring in the series. Now for me, the Gentleman Bastard's books, as fun as the plots are, feel more character driven to me. But for me, Red Seas actually felt a lot more character driven than lies. You have the plot constantly going, but for me that wasn't what kept me invested and kept me coming back to the book. What kept me coming back was Locke and Jean and their continuously evolving situation and how they had to deal with it. The plot's still amazing, but again, for me, what kept me coming back was Locke and Jean themselves being very, very, very entertaining characters. With all of this in mind, I personally would probably say that Red Seas under Red Skies rolls a solid 17 for me, enough to keep me coming back again every so often to reread these books. Not something that I'd probably do like once a year or so. I actually personally very much enjoy rereading books. I find more stuff in them than I ever have before. So I'll probably definitely come back to this. I don't know when, if I do, I might do another video when I probably not though. But this book is highly entertaining. If you like Lies of Locke-La-Mora, you are definitely going to enjoy the second book within the series Red Seas Under Red Skies. Alright guys, I hope that you enjoyed that video from me. If you liked that video and would like to continue to see content from me, hit the subscribe button down below. If you'd like to follow me on either Twitter or Instagram, links to both of those are going to be in the description down below as always. 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