A review by cavalary
Eternal Knight by Matt Heppe

adventurous fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

While not standing out in any way, the first five chapters are nice enough, catching my attention and keeping me reading and interested in the characters and events. But what truly matters is the last quarter or so of the book, when things change dramatically multiple times, the mess that I tend to call the typical human filth gives way to thrilling action, the fact that it’s hard to know who or what to believe can actually be a positive aspect as well, considering the valid points made by the various sides and the genuine intentions of the antagonists, and characters develop in ways that are largely positive. And, while it opens the way for the rest of the series, Eternal Knight also has an entirely serviceable conclusion on its own.

The problem, however, is pretty much everything between those first five chapters and that final quarter, which is dominated by that typical human filth, making for rather painful reading. And that’s not just because I’m all too aware of that filth in “reality” and would want to escape from it while reading fantasy, but because it’s also poor in concept. I learned that the book was edited down to less than half of the size of the original draft, forgetting that fantasy should carefully craft and present new worlds in detail, so it’s possible that there was more to it at first, but what’s left is a court, and a society, that’s little more than a caricature, roughly pushing something like the trope of the noble savage and savage nobles and some themes of privilege and discrimination without having any impact, without giving them meaning. And opportunities for action and explanations are either skipped entirely or so forced and amateurish that it’s hard to believe that they were written by the same person who wrote that last quarter of the book. And I’ll also note that, while I was initially surprised by the use of creatures from Romanian myths, I then realized that the author just liked to use the words for some creatures he imagined.