Review: Knight's Wyrd

Knight's Wyrd by Debra Doyle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A reissue of a book from the 90s which falls outside the usual lines. One of the co-authors had a strong background in early English literature, which shows through but without being constantly thrust in your face. It's not, as Sherwood Smith says in the introduction, one of those books with thin characters who speak forsoothly in a world of Look At My Research (I think I'm paraphrasing slightly). The third-person POV protagonist is the only really rounded character, but that's to be expected in a relatively short book, and the others at least have believable motivations.

The potential romance is averted, the prophecy turns out otherwise than expected, and in general it's the opposite of cliched. It also feels relatively authentic to a story of the era of, say, Gawain and the Green Knight, while also working as a modern piece of fiction. All of this is difficult to achieve, hence its place in the Silver tier of my Best of the Year list.

Returning to that Sherwood Smith intro, I was enjoying it up to the point where Smith started telling me the entire plot of the book I was about to read, which I preferred to discover by actually reading it. I skipped the rest of the introduction for that reason.

The book itself steers a careful middle course between depicting the realities of being a medieval knight (such as the dangers of riding through a forest in a closed helm) and retaining the feel of a chivalric tale, in which there's inevitably a lot of idealization and abstraction. Not every nobleman in it is noble, and not every knight is chivalrous, but some of them are, notably the protagonist. It also features wizards, and monsters such as ogres, so it's definitely fantasy, but they are much more like their medieval versions than what you would tend to encounter in most contemporary fantasy written after the advent of Dungeons & Dragons.

Recommended if you want something a bit different from standard fantasy that's also well-executed.

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