Review: The Misenchanted Sword

The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt-Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As I come to do this review I've already read several other books in the series (thanks, Covid), so I'll do a bit of a series intro as well as reviewing this specific book.

This is an early-Terry Pratchett-style series, in that characters and locations recur, but each book stands alone and is about a new protagonist. These protagonists are, to varying degrees, young (from early teens to early 20s, usually), and the books are basically coming-of-age stories. Typically, the protagonist starts out with an obvious fault such as a young person might credibly have: they're lazy, or selfish, or dishonest, for example. Over the course of the book, they grow and change from being an unpromising Everyperson to a solid character who we (generally) like and cheer for, and who achieves something remarkable.

The style is light and amusing, without ever becoming outright comedic.

The editing varies from not terrible to quite good; mostly the issues are simple typos, missing words (often "the"), and misplaced apostrophes where the noun is plural, and the latter is occasional rather than consistent.

In this case, the protagonist is a young soldier in a war that's been going on for centuries. (I found the multi-century war a bit hard to swallow, along with the idea that there were no prisoner exchanges. Also, (view spoiler)[when the war stops, it stops completely and there are no more wars to speak of (except petty ones in the Small Kingdoms) for the next several centuries; a bit more plausible, since after such a long war you'd want to be done with it, but still got some side-eye from me. (hide spoiler)])

He's a scout, and gets separated from his unit and stuck behind enemy lines, where he meets a wizard who, to get rid of him, enchants his sword. The enchantment... has its fishhooks, for sure, and while the biggest problem gets solved for him, he does protagonize trying to get out of his newly complicated situation.

One of the best features of the protagonist is that he doesn't actually want to kill people; he wants a quiet, peaceful life, and instead of this being a "reluctant protagonist" situation, it becomes a good motivator for him to overcome some obstacles. The resolution, despite the assist from a new character, is satisfying, and the character will have several cameos in future books in the series.

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