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A review by siavahda
Blackheart Knights by Laure Eve
5.0
HIGHLIGHTS
~King Arthur, but motorbikes!!!
~King Arthur, but queer people exist!!!
~knights as rockstars
~you should definitely listen to the fortune-teller, actually
~magic graffiti
Perhaps you love the King Arthur mythos. Perhaps you hate it. Perhaps you’ve actually managed to be an English-speaker who's never heard of it at all.
It really doesn’t matter which, because whatever camp you fall into, I think you’ll love Blackheart Knights. Because it’s a retelling that manages to honour and draw heavily from the ‘canon’ (if the King Arthur story can be said to have a canon, which I’m not sure it really can) while being so original, so itself, that you can forget about it being a retelling at all if you want to. It stands on its own with or without the ‘canon’ to back it up – and it’s standing across from you in the fighting ring, with its sword drawn, telling you to bring it.
Laure Eve has created a brilliant world not quite like anything I’ve ever seen before. The landmass that is Scotland-England-Wales is divided up into multiple kingdoms, of which London is the most powerful and influential. But the setting isn’t medieval; there are knights, but they ride motorbikes, not horses, and though they fight with swords, guns are absolutely a thing. There’s magic, but the people who can use it – godchildren – wear monitoring bands around their wrists and are tattooed at 18 so people can identify them. Fashion trends are set by rockstar knights; legal disputes are decided in an official arena, where the champions of each party fight until the Saints grant the deserving side their victory. Televisions are ‘glow-screens’, and over the course of the book we see them go from being an expensive rarity to something every household owns. And London itself is divided into districts, each ruled over by one of the seven families descended from the Saints who established the modern world.
It’s strange, and delightfully different, and it’s so beautifully cohesive. Eve’s London is so real you can almost touch it, all the disparate parts coming together in a perfectly organic whole. No part of it ever rang false or unrealistic or there Just Because. It all works.
And so does the story. Stories, really, because Blackheart Knights is made up of two storylines, following two different characters. The first is Art, who is very clearly Eve’s take on King Arthur; he’s the illegitimate son of King Uther, his conception was surrounded in scandal and magic, and he was raised outside of London, away from its politics. The book opens with him and his friends being surprised by the news of Uther’s death, and the revelation that Art is now, kind-of-sort-of-but-very-temporarily, King. Temporary, because London’s monarchy isn’t decided by blood; the new King (or Queen) will be determined by the Saints, as each noble family puts forward their champion, and the winner of the subsequent tournament takes the crown. And while Art originally has no intention of putting any champion forward – having no desire to be King – his friends convince him of the good he could potentially do in the role, and so he goes through with it.
It’s not really a spoiler to tell you that his champion wins, is it?
Read the rest at Every Book a Doorway!
~King Arthur, but motorbikes!!!
~King Arthur, but queer people exist!!!
~knights as rockstars
~you should definitely listen to the fortune-teller, actually
~magic graffiti
Perhaps you love the King Arthur mythos. Perhaps you hate it. Perhaps you’ve actually managed to be an English-speaker who's never heard of it at all.
It really doesn’t matter which, because whatever camp you fall into, I think you’ll love Blackheart Knights. Because it’s a retelling that manages to honour and draw heavily from the ‘canon’ (if the King Arthur story can be said to have a canon, which I’m not sure it really can) while being so original, so itself, that you can forget about it being a retelling at all if you want to. It stands on its own with or without the ‘canon’ to back it up – and it’s standing across from you in the fighting ring, with its sword drawn, telling you to bring it.
Laure Eve has created a brilliant world not quite like anything I’ve ever seen before. The landmass that is Scotland-England-Wales is divided up into multiple kingdoms, of which London is the most powerful and influential. But the setting isn’t medieval; there are knights, but they ride motorbikes, not horses, and though they fight with swords, guns are absolutely a thing. There’s magic, but the people who can use it – godchildren – wear monitoring bands around their wrists and are tattooed at 18 so people can identify them. Fashion trends are set by rockstar knights; legal disputes are decided in an official arena, where the champions of each party fight until the Saints grant the deserving side their victory. Televisions are ‘glow-screens’, and over the course of the book we see them go from being an expensive rarity to something every household owns. And London itself is divided into districts, each ruled over by one of the seven families descended from the Saints who established the modern world.
It’s strange, and delightfully different, and it’s so beautifully cohesive. Eve’s London is so real you can almost touch it, all the disparate parts coming together in a perfectly organic whole. No part of it ever rang false or unrealistic or there Just Because. It all works.
And so does the story. Stories, really, because Blackheart Knights is made up of two storylines, following two different characters. The first is Art, who is very clearly Eve’s take on King Arthur; he’s the illegitimate son of King Uther, his conception was surrounded in scandal and magic, and he was raised outside of London, away from its politics. The book opens with him and his friends being surprised by the news of Uther’s death, and the revelation that Art is now, kind-of-sort-of-but-very-temporarily, King. Temporary, because London’s monarchy isn’t decided by blood; the new King (or Queen) will be determined by the Saints, as each noble family puts forward their champion, and the winner of the subsequent tournament takes the crown. And while Art originally has no intention of putting any champion forward – having no desire to be King – his friends convince him of the good he could potentially do in the role, and so he goes through with it.
It’s not really a spoiler to tell you that his champion wins, is it?
Read the rest at Every Book a Doorway!