| Knight Errant |
| Filed Under: Recommended Reading | ||
| Word Ninja Wrote this Article. | ||
| Friday, 01 July 2011 00:00 | ||
A battle of life, love, and obligations, Knight Errant is an entertaining construct of who owes what to whom and how to go about making everyone happy, in every sense of the word. Readers of Knight Errant will get to experience teenage love through the mind of one Taro Hibiki: His love for the life he lives aboard the starship Pendragon’s Dream with his eclectic family that reminds me of a battle-hardened version of the Firefly crew. His love for baggage of the human variety, primarily one Rafe Ballard – whose love for happiness is equal only to his love for wearing the entire color spectrum at any given time. And even Taro’s love of gambling in bars, which tends to end up with someone going through a window before the night is done. Trying to fight Eve is an exercise in futility. Trying to fight Eve and her memories of Taro’s mother…yeah, Taro doesn’t lead an easy life. Never mind his reputation for getting kicked out of more bars than I’ve ever even been to. Ignore his abilities to survive on a poison infested planet of fanged fuzzies and debilitating bugs with nothing but a pleasantly distracting Rafe and a space pirate family with delusions of sanity. Those are just warm up practices for handling Eve’s opinion and trust of Taro’s life decisions. Unlike the few novels I’ve read that have the LGBT theme tagged on to the plot, the fact that the main protagonists are both male and happen to have sex is not the primary focus of the whole story. And for that I thank the author. Yes, it plays an integral part in the reactions of various characters, like Eve Marcori, who I would never ever want to cross…ever. But the primary focus, at least that came across to me, was Taro’s battle over Eve’s expectations of him that were set up by Taro’s deceased mother. This is one of those books that will stay on my comfort reads shelf, next to some David Eddings and Douglas Adams. Why? Because it’s an entertaining read that I can peruse at my leisure and find a scene or chapter to distract me from my daily troubles. The first time I read it, I thought nothing of characters’ ages, but during the read through I noticed how a 16 year old survivor in space would act so ridiculously in matters of love and family. My conservative upbringing made me wonder why he couldn’t have been turning 18 or some semi-more appropriate age for baggage shenanigans. But the realist in me leans more towards the 16 years old as a better age for this character in this plot. Wish I could pull off some of the things Taro does back when I was 16. Although I could do without the whole being stuck on a dangerous planet that seems to be filled with dangerous animals and dangerous people. I’ll leave that to Taro. I’d recommend this book to fans of modern space operas. I say modern in the recently printed manner, as space operas of seasons past tend to be more space and less opera. This book is a solid balance of space and opera, in the romantic and comedic shenanigans way. No actual operas occur during the book.
The love plots between the various characters leave the dangly bits to the reader’s imagination, but there are still a few scenes I wouldn’t want some of the penguin-suited commuters on my train to read over my shoulder. There are a few wonky formatting bits here and there, which can happen with self-published and sort of self-published books. Reviewed by committee before approved for publishing can make for tricky times in handling all the various editing suggestions. So if unexpected punctuation quirks really annoy you, you’ve been warned. I look forward to the upcoming sequel His Faithful Squire, being released through Turtleduck Press on August 1st of this year! |
