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The Review Knight
Feb. 13th, 2013 03:18 pmHey,
So I stayed up way, way, WAY too late to finish The Red Knight by Miles Cameron. Take advantage of my sleep deprivation!
So this is one of those fantasy books that really likes to get historical details right. Which means it's basically Medieval Europe (and England especially) with the serial numbers filed off...badly. That said, the book doesn't get too bogged down in the details (except for the word sabaton and the tedious dressing required by even civilian fashions).
You've got this guy, The Red Knight. He's got a Dark Mysterious Past, but these days he leads a company of mercenaries. Usually they fight men, but here in Albia they've got a problem with the Wild -- the Wild being a catch-all term for all variety of supernatural monsters from relatively unimportant Irks to Daemons, Wyvern and the like. An Abbess has hired the Red Knight's crew to help put down a couple of irritating monsters before they can threaten the Abbey and the major trade fair coming up.
Things quickly escalate and soon there's an all out siege against the fortress.
The book clips along fast and switches to numerous viewpoints. It can, sometimes, be a little difficult to properly identify characters and then mentally located them relative to the others, but it's not awful and you do tend to stick to a few major characters within the book. A couple of maps and drawings would've been super-helpful though.
The big draw for this book is the fighting. Again, the author is showing off here a bit, but the fight scenes, even against the monsters are well done and tend to emphasize the hurt and exhaustion of running around in armor and hacking things down. There's a little bit in there on horses and falconry and it's all very entertaining. Despite a fair amount of magic to help push the plot along, the bulk of the book is fairly gritty fantasy.
The book is the start of a series, but finds a very good stopping place and spends about 20-40 pages doing a little bit of prep work for the next book. Nothing too terrible though.
So yeah, an engrossing, gritty fantasy book that's fun to read.
later
Tom
So I stayed up way, way, WAY too late to finish The Red Knight by Miles Cameron. Take advantage of my sleep deprivation!
So this is one of those fantasy books that really likes to get historical details right. Which means it's basically Medieval Europe (and England especially) with the serial numbers filed off...badly. That said, the book doesn't get too bogged down in the details (except for the word sabaton and the tedious dressing required by even civilian fashions).
You've got this guy, The Red Knight. He's got a Dark Mysterious Past, but these days he leads a company of mercenaries. Usually they fight men, but here in Albia they've got a problem with the Wild -- the Wild being a catch-all term for all variety of supernatural monsters from relatively unimportant Irks to Daemons, Wyvern and the like. An Abbess has hired the Red Knight's crew to help put down a couple of irritating monsters before they can threaten the Abbey and the major trade fair coming up.
Things quickly escalate and soon there's an all out siege against the fortress.
The book clips along fast and switches to numerous viewpoints. It can, sometimes, be a little difficult to properly identify characters and then mentally located them relative to the others, but it's not awful and you do tend to stick to a few major characters within the book. A couple of maps and drawings would've been super-helpful though.
The big draw for this book is the fighting. Again, the author is showing off here a bit, but the fight scenes, even against the monsters are well done and tend to emphasize the hurt and exhaustion of running around in armor and hacking things down. There's a little bit in there on horses and falconry and it's all very entertaining. Despite a fair amount of magic to help push the plot along, the bulk of the book is fairly gritty fantasy.
The book is the start of a series, but finds a very good stopping place and spends about 20-40 pages doing a little bit of prep work for the next book. Nothing too terrible though.
So yeah, an engrossing, gritty fantasy book that's fun to read.
later
Tom
