Customer Reviews

The Good Knight (A Gareth and Gwen Medieval Mystery)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've been looking for something to satisfy my Brother Cadfael craving for years, ever since my beloved Ellis Peters passed away, and I've never quite found a series that filled in the gap until I read The Good Knight. It's an absolutely fantastic read, historically authentic with a wealth of period detail and great insight into both the political situation and daily life in medieval Wales. What I loved most of all, though, was exactly what I love so much about the Ellis Peters books: in Gwen, the author has created a fiesty, intelligent heroine who can hold her own even in a very male-dominated world. And romance! A romance that is sweet without being at all sappy, just wonderfully done. Sarah Woodbury, hurry up and write the next book in the series, because I can't wait to find out what happens to Gwen and Gareth! I hope they have as many adventures together as Brother Cadfael!

Woodbury has captured the space vacated by the death of Ellis Peters. This is a fun book with embraceable characters and welcome plot twists. Well done! If you like medieval mysteries, you will like this book.

I saw this book on a table at a friend's house, picked it up, and started reading. I finished it in two days. The story starts out quickly and doesn't slow down. The heroine is strong-minded and active without being over the top, and the author does a good job of balancing action, mystery, and romance. Welsh politics figures heavily in the story, so the cast of characters and map are helpful for those of us who don't know much about the history or geography of Wales. Ultimately I found this book to be both fast-paced and substantive.

This book was written just for me. It had me in it as the heroine. A nobody that made a name for herself and got the man of her dreams eventually. A hero that was dashing, daring, and a damn nice guy and a really bad villain that no one guessed was bad. It had all the right ingredients for a super incredible book. I loved it from beginning to end.

I think what I liked most about this book is the ease it was to read. It didn't have any fancy speech, no huge words that I had to look up and no terms that I didn't understand. It was written with an easy-going style that I found relaxing.

The story was believable, the characters easy to fall in love with even if you didn't want to and it had enough twists and turns to keep me guessing throughout. I wouldn't change a thing. Definitely a must read over and over again.

While the writing style is good (which can't always be said for ebooks < $5), I feel the author could have developed the characters background stories a lot more. I also had no sense of time or place, since descriptions were sparse. I couldn't picture where the characters were or what they were wearing, or even what they looked like, and I found this quite distracting. I read historical fiction (Ellis Peters, Sharon Kay Penman, Dorothy Dunnett, Allison Weir, Jack Whyte, Ariana Franklin, Edward Rutherford, the list goes on!) in order to be (temporarily) transported back in time, and this book, while it definitely has potential, didn't quite deliver me there.

I loved this book. I find historical novels interesting but I wasn't sure if this was my type of reading so was very pleasantly surprised at how much I liked it. I will be reading more books by this author.

This book was like a modern crime story plunked down in the middle of Medieval Wales. Aside from some of the characters being based on the names of actual persons who lived in the 12th century the rest of it is modern as it can be. Knights in the 12th century used a broad sword. They used daggers. They were called sir. They did not speak in the jargon of a modern crime scene investigator. There was a distraction that broke the flow of the fictive dream on nearly every page.

I wanted to like it and I was curios to learn what happened. Even the ending was a disappointment. The title is the Good Knight. I expected the story to be about the Knight. It was not. I wanted the language and the descriptions of life to feel authentically historical and larger than life. I wanted to find a character that I cared about. I found non of those thing things. What this book needs is a good editor and publisher who will help the author fix the worst of its flaws.

That being said Gareth's sir name Rhys is on my family tree, so it can't be all bad.