Reviewed by Chris
TITLE: Of Gallantry and Magic
AUTHOR: Alex Hintermann
PUBLISHER: Self-Published
LENGTH: 196 pages
RELEASE DATE: September 15, 2018
BLURB:
Sir Tristan, son of a continental hero, is summoned to the court of Schafheim to interview for a novice knight position. After dozens of applications to courts all over the Continent, Lord Schafheim wants to see him. Immediately. But when he arrives for the interview, things start to go wrong: a brash, bearded commoner ties his dragon too close to Sir Tristan’s firebreather and refuses to move it. This same commoner offers to love Tristan in the way he has always desired.
REVIEW:
Um…
Oh boy.
So, I have read this book, and to be perfectly honest, I’m not entirely sure what it was about. The blurb says it is about Tristan’s search to become novice knight, and along the way he runs into this commoner guy who is vexing and sexy (I guess? I mean, if a stunning lack of understanding about consent turns you on, he’s totally sexy.). There are also dragons.
And…well, yeah I guess that is what happens in the book. The only problem is that the story is almost 200 pages long and I have no fucking clue what I just read.
Seriously. This story is written in this faux-medieval narrative and dialogue style and it made the thing nigh unreadable. I could understand every word on the page, but my god, I kept getting distracted by the simplest things around me because this story had a serious problem holding more than .001% of my attention. As a result it was really hard to pay attention to the actual story because I could barely remember what happened in the last chapter. I have problems forgetting stories I’ve read years ago. This is not a normal problem for me. It didn’t help that Chapter 3 and Chapter 5 of my ARC are exactly the same chapter (hopefully this is an error that got fixed before the final product went out) and it took me five pages to realize why the plot was making even less sense than normal.
The way this book is written made everything seems so fake and artificial. It was very hard to care about the characters or the story, because of it. I can’t help but compare it to T.J. Klune’s The Lightning-Struck Heart…and boy does it come up short. They are both fantasy stories that have this flippant anachronistic tone, but Of Gallantry and Magic lacks the wit and charm of Klune’s story. There is no heart here. No reason to care. None of it felt real. It was like being stuck in a low-rent Ren-faire, unable to immerse myself in the game of make-believe because at every turn the artificiality of it was glaringly obvious.
I want to say that “at least it wasn’t badly written,” but if the way you write a sentence makes storytelling nearly impossible, I’m not sure I should be giving kudos from basic grammatical understanding. Because this is a book, and the writing is all I have to understand the story, and if I am unable to understand the story, the writing must have failed in some fundamental way.
I honestly don’t know if other people will like this. I guess it totally depends on whether the writing style works for you or not. There is totally a chance that people out there will find it charming and fun. And good for them. I truly hope that they enjoy this book. But, as for me, this story had too many fundamental flaws to paper over–no matter how many cool dragon tricks it wanted to throw my way.
RATING: 
BUY LINK: