Gurzil

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. I'll say from the get go, that historical fiction is not my cup of tea in most cases. I was fresh off of reading The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell, which wasn't great for me, and I. Anonymous saw my review and recommended I try his book.

This is a book based around the histories of St. George (of dragon slayer fame), and Arthurian legend. Arthur has a minor cameo, at least in this first book, and Merlin does as well. George is one of the major players.

So let's start with what I liked. This book promises a dragon, and it delivers. This is a world grounded in a reality that assumes dragons to be myths, but instead they exist. Or one does at least, and he is a terror. An amazing terror. While you do have the typical drakonic tropes, like maiden servants and hoarding gold, that is where the similarities end. This dragon has a pretty awesome origin backstory, and is the focus of a cult of worshippers, and I loved that take. There is magic as well, and while it's very minimal as far as magic is concerned, it does play an interesting part in the story. There's about as much magic use as you would expect from a George R. R. Martin novel; very little but important. I really enjoyed some of the characters too, especially Sabra and George. It's a quick read as well, and the writing isn't overly complex. The prose is very inviting and well written.

So, now on to the cons. With such potential for the great cast of characters, the character interactions and dialogue were very minor. The author goes to great lengths to “tell” the story of the characters, but the POV of the characters themselves are utilized sparingly, although there are exceptions. I'm a very character driven reader, and so I prefer to be “showed” how my characters got where they are. At times it felt like reading a history lesson, although it was an interesting history lesson to read. There were also a few instances of grammatical error, which can happen, and is understandable. Since this is an ARC, some of those may be fixed in the final copy. There were several words used, however, that were not part of the vernacular of the time in history that the story was portraying, so that took me out of the story a bit.

Overall, despite some of the cons mentioned, I thought the author did a good job for a debut novel.