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nimirra 's review for:
The Princess Knight
by Cait Jacobs
Our premise starts off very much in the vein of a fantasy Legally Blonde. Our Princess, Clía, is sure her childhood friend, Prince Domhnall, is going to propose. It would be beneficial for both their kingdoms and they’re friends so it’s a given, right? Well, it goes about the same as in the movie. Domhnall tells her she isn’t the warrior queen he needs and Clía is devastated as all her plans for the future crumble. But instead of succumbing to defeat, Clía hatches a plan to follow him away to Caislean Costa, the keep and training grounds for respected warriors. If she is able to withstand the rigorous training for a year, she will be awarded the title of curadh and be the warrior queen Domhnall seeks. Things don’t go exactly as planned.
Let’s talk about the characters!
Clía is sweet and determined and I liked her. She did make some questionable assumptions such as thinking going into what is basically military boot camp with zero skills or knowledge of tactics was a good idea. I was able to overlook this and root for her regardless. Thankfully, she ended up getting some much-needed help from an unexpected source…
Ronan! Captain of the guard for Domhnall and yet somehow a sweet squish of a dude. Thanks to Ronan we get one of my favorite things: a training trope with romantic tension. He’s conflicted because he’s starting to have feelings for his prince/best friend’s Not!Fiancée and he’s just the youngest Captain of the guard — not royalty.
Murphy. I loved him.
Domhnall. His childhood friendship with Clía is talked about a lot, but we see none of it. We get a couple vague ‘Remember that time when…’ but it doesn’t strike the note since we never see any evidence of them being friends. Clía does hold up her end of the deal, I will say and I like her for it. But Domhnall seems to be a bad friend at every turn. We only see Domhnall being a jerk and do not have the benefit of his POV to redeem him via his inner thoughts. It leads to me not being invested in him as a character and several times I had been hoping he would be pushed to the side or just painted fully as a villain. He gets a little better later, but too little too late imo.
Everyone else… well. I will say that while people did start getting a little characterization in the tail-end of the book, it never felt like there were more than 5 trainees at Caislean Costa. I got no sense of the size of the keep or their training class since it was the same group of names each time. They were very much NPCs and I would have liked a bit more from them so the military bootcamp experience would have felt more fleshed out.
Don’t get me started on her parents. What was the deal there? The only thing we know about them is that we’re told they like to party.
Let’s talk about the plot!
This is where things went a little haywire. We started off strong. Maybe not with the thickest plot, but it was fun. I was reading quickly and enjoying the callbacks to the Legally Blonde inspiration.
[I’m someone that hates spoilers and avoids them at all costs. Hence, I’m going to avoid major spoilers here. The one I will include (since it drastically tempered my thoughts on the story) has almost no bearing on the actual plot. Which was my gripe, actually.]
This is a low-magic setting. We do get hints of it here and there in passing, not active magic, but it’s mentioned mostly through enchanted objects that are not shown on-page. I thought this was foreshadowing to something important for later. When we do finally encounter a potentially God-given magic artifact, it’s brushed under the rug so casually that it’s a blink-and-you-miss-it situation. Not in the vein of subtlety to bring up later as a twist (which is what I was anticipating), but moreso that the author and characters were just not interested in it enough to make it a real factor? I was interested!
Please, please can we talk about the magic sword crystal? Please, as a treat? It was an interesting thread I wanted to follow in the story, but was treated like an afterthought. I mean even the characters kept thinking “Ah ya this sword is giving me some strange feelings, but no time to think about magic firing up my arm or anything.” Come on! The story didn’t need this at all, but putting it in there and ignoring it was confusing and disappointing.
Now for the anime-level powerup Clía gets. This is the girl that couldn’t actually hold up a sword, let alone wield one, at the start. Her first time picking one up included the description of her letting it drag along the ground as she walked, because holding it was too difficult. While we have no sense for how long she had been training at Caislean Costa, there is no suspension of belief that could permit her battling several seasoned warriors on her own with just a regular sword. There is simply not enough time for her princess noodle arms to have beefed up enough. When we later had the excuse of a maybe-magic sword, I could believe this princess taking on several attackers at once. Because *~magick~* Even with her special armor, the impact of a hit, sword or otherwise, would still cause injury. I mean there’s gurl power and then there’s… whatever that was. I don’t know. I love sword fighting ladies. Jude from Folk of the Air is one of my favorite book gals. With Jude, she often got injured and would have to resort to alternative means to balance the playing field to her advantage. Her victories felt earned and real. I like Clía. Which is why it bothered me so much that she started to feel like a wish-fulfillment pander. She was virtually undefeatable. I never feared for her. Thus, there was no dramatic tension in the fights.
It was moments like this that made me surprised to learn this wasn’t a YA fantasy since that is where I have seen this happen the most often. The romance scenes were fade-to-black which I am fine with, but does lend further to the YA feel.
Conclusion!
Overall, I did enjoy this read. The first half was more to my speed due to losing some verisimilitude in the latter chapters. This is not something that is a deal breaker for most, so I do still recommend this book. There were two good quotes I made note of in my reading. I would like to include them in my review, but as the arc I read was not in final edits, I will hold off to see if they appear in the final version. Will update later with the quotes if they make the cut. Fingers crossed!
Thank you to Netgalley and Avon and Harper Voyager for providing me with this free arc in exchange for my honest review.