BOOK- Lady’s Knight

AUTHORS- Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner

GENRE- girl knight, fantasy, romance,

STATUS- DNF’d

RATING- 2/5

I thought I would love this book. I mean, it’s co-written by Meagan Spooner.

How wrong I was…

PLOT

Two maidens. One tournament. A whole heap of medieval trouble.

Gwen is sick of hiding- hiding her blacksmith skills, hiding her attraction to girls, hiding her desire to be a knight. Lady Isobelle has never had to hide who she is. But now she is to marry the winner of the Tournament of Dragonslayers. And for the first time in her life, she can’t talk her way out of trouble.

Then the two girls meet. Sparks fly as they concoct a daring scheme. Winning means freedom for Isobelle and glory for Gwen. Losing means…well let’s not go there. But falling in love was never part of the plan.

Reading the blurb in my local library, I tossed in onto my TBR with the expectation that this would be like Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale- but with a lot more lesbians and dragons. And since I did enjoy watching A Knight’s Tale, this seemed like a win.

Add to that my immediate admiration of any book written by Meagan Spooner, and it would seem I’d found my perfect book.

I think, that, deep down, some part of me knew this couldn’t be true. I know they say don’t judge a book by its cover, but there was something about it that seemed to be warning me…I know this sounds weird (I’m a weird person, tbh) but it was almost like it was as trying to tell me ‘don’t read it, it’ll just be The Princess Knight all over again’. Maybe it was the way Isobelle was looking at me from the cover art, maybe it was the term ‘medieval mayhem’, I don’t know what it was that gave me that…feeling of wrongness.

And yet, despite first impressions, I read it. Or, at least, I read the first few chapters.

I really do admire Amie and Meagan- they’re both incredible writers. But Lady’s Knight just didn’t hit the mark enough to- in my eyes- be considered a success. I knew I would be going into this with high expectations after reading Sherwood, so I was aware it would never live up. However, I just think that Lady’s Knight was destined to be a DNF from me.

There was a couple of things I didn’t like about Lady’s Knight. The first of these is simple: the plot felt too tired. When I picked it up, I knew there would be the inevitable girl-knight tropes. What I didn’t know was how truly vanilla Lady’s Knight would be. To start with, the humour didn’t deliver. While the chapter titles might have been slightly amusing for a bit, most of the so-called ‘humour’ just made me raise my eyebrows and sigh. It wasn’t funny. Simple as that. Also, on top of this, every single plot point seemed…unoriginal. I get that Lady’s Knight was supposed to be this kind of queer fairy-tale-romp, but that’s no excuse to copy and paste almost everything that happens to the characters. I found it boring. And considering the fact that Goodreads describes Lady’s Knight as “unforgettably funny“, this didn’t really bode well for the rest of the book.

Secondly, the writing felt waaaaaay too juvenile. This is the second time this has happened to me recently- I still haven’t got over being patronized by Sasha Peyton Smith in The Rose Bargain– and it’s really starting to get on my nerves. I don’t understand why, in order to be lighthearted, Lady’s Knight has to be written as if for primary school children. Something can be funny and for older readers. Nobody seems to object to Iron Man or Peter Quill cracking jokes in PG-13 films while they save the world from frankly quite terrifying monsters or killer AI or whatever the cinemas comes up with next

The main thing I have an issue with in this case was just the fact that the writing was so…simple. My brother likes Amie Kaufman’s Illuminae books, and while I confess that I have never read them, I know they’re written like case files. Meagan Spooner wrote one of my favorite novels ever, Sherwood, and it is beautifully written. Enter Lady’s Knight, written in boring, generic prose, no different to hundreds of other books I have read and will read. I know that Amie and Meagan are both insanely clever and infinetly creative women, so why are we being given this boring, unoriginal book?

This sounds so dramatic, but I genuinely feel betrayed right now.

Thirdly, the tone and vocabulary felt much too modern. I mean, I don’t have anything against the occasional ‘ok’ or ‘sure’ in fantasy. They’re inescapable. But when characters are saying things like ‘dude’ and ‘awesome’ while living in a medieval-inspired society…I can’t deal with that. Also, the cheesecake? At what point do people in medieval times have the, I don’t know, fridges and cream cheese needed to make cheesecake?

People will probably think I’m being pedantic at this point, but you try to get lost in a medieval fantasy where the characters talk like people from the 21st century. I just couldn’t do it. The sheer amount of obvious modern influences made the whole thing seem…unreal. And I know you’re going to go ‘well, obviously, what were you expecting? It’s fiction’ at this point, but that’s not the kind of real I mean.

Sherwood is ‘real’. Carve the Mark is ‘real’. Hell, even The Rose Bargain was ‘real’. They make sense for their world. That’s what I mean when I say ‘real’. That a reader can believe that the events happened, that there’s no holes or confusion. Things feel lived in and thought out. This didn’t happen in Lady’s Knight. I could just as easily believe it happened on the moon, or in New York, or in my own school.

And I don’t want to believe it happened on the moon or in New York or in my own school. I want to believe that it happened when it was based. And though I understand that being only medieval inspired gives you some liberty as a writer, there was just too much that didn’t make sense.

I would have loved to talk about the romance, but I didn’t get that far before giving up, so…

CHARACTERS

The characters in Lady’s Knight really got on my nerves.

That’s all I have to say really…

I didn’t really read far enough into the book to get a clear picture of the characters, but I do know that they were all soooooo irritating. I thought I knew annoying characters, but this is a whole other level.

And it wasn’t just one or two…

They were all irritating

I’m going to cry.

And it wasn’t like they all had the same little thing. They were all annoying in a unique and torturous way. Isobelle was like one of those tiny dogs that never stop yapping. Constantly demanding attention. She’s not the good kind of diva. (To clarify, Alarik from Twin Crowns is an example of ‘the good kind of diva’).

Gwen was just so…I don’t even know. She was so annoying I can’t even describe it. For once, I’m lost for words.

I couldn’t relate to any of them. I didn’t want to relate to any of them.

And because I couldn’t relate to them, I didn’t root for them.

And because I didn’t root for them, the book seemed pointless.

So I DNF’d.

THE END