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A review by books_with_benghis_kahn
Sharpe's Eagle: Richard Sharpe and the Talavera Campaign July 1809 by Bernard Cornwell
4.0
Another solid Sharpe book sped through in a blink! This was the second one Cornwell published in 1981, and I was worried there would be a big dip in quality going so far back, but I'm happy to report from the front lines that it slots just fine into the middle of a great series.
This battle in Spain that provided the climax wasn't the most exciting of military actions, but Cornwell raised the stakes throughout the book with his fictional bastard of a Colonel Simmerson, who is just a classic Sharpe villain. The moment toward the beginning of the book when Simmerson Blood-boiling stuff!!
It seems like an inevitable aspect of every Sharpe book that there's a beautiful girl who catches Sharpe's interest, and this plotline was reaaaaaaally cringy in this one, handled so much more poorly than in his late 90s-early 2000s Sharpe books that I read before this, and this dates the book pretty badly unfortunately. Luckily it didn't receive too much page time, but I wish it had been cut.
Otherwise it was engaging and fun to listen to (the Farley audiobook version), and I'm deeply impressed by how he wrote all the characters so consistently doing it so far out of chronological order, since this seems like such a natural progression for everyone from the previous books that hadn't even been written yet.
This battle in Spain that provided the climax wasn't the most exciting of military actions, but Cornwell raised the stakes throughout the book with his fictional bastard of a Colonel Simmerson, who is just a classic Sharpe villain. The moment toward the beginning of the book when Simmerson
Spoiler
royally screws up by crossing the river and then blowing up the bridge out of cowardice stranding Sharpe and a bunch of men, and Sharpe heroically saves the day by capturing the French gun, was such a great moment -- only to end in wretched injustice as Simmerson writes home to blame Sharpe and kill his career.It seems like an inevitable aspect of every Sharpe book that there's a beautiful girl who catches Sharpe's interest, and this plotline was reaaaaaaally cringy in this one, handled so much more poorly than in his late 90s-early 2000s Sharpe books that I read before this, and this dates the book pretty badly unfortunately. Luckily it didn't receive too much page time, but I wish it had been cut.
Otherwise it was engaging and fun to listen to (the Farley audiobook version), and I'm deeply impressed by how he wrote all the characters so consistently doing it so far out of chronological order, since this seems like such a natural progression for everyone from the previous books that hadn't even been written yet.