One Good Knight / 978-0-373-80260-9I rather enjoy the Five Hundred Kingdoms books - starting with "The Fairy Godmother" and continuing to the recent fifth book "The Sleeping Beauty". The tales are something of a mixed-up fairy tale due to the unique backstory: a powerful and impersonal force called The Tradition constantly tries to impose "fairy tale" logic on people whose lives loosely fit the structure of commonly told fairy tales, and Godmothers and Champions devote their lives trying to facilitate the happy endings and thwart the bad ones that The Tradition tries to impose.This is the second book in the loosely connected series, and I have to admit that I enjoyed it a bit more than its predecessor, "The Fairy Godmother" - probably for the same reasons that others *didn't*. The major differences here is that "One Good Knight" is slightly shorter (an approximate 400 pages to TFG's 500), and their is significantly less emphasis on romance and much more emphasis on the given fractured fairy tale (a mash-up of the Greek Andromeda myth and the English 'George and the Dragon' tale). Judge your own tastes accordingly - if what you most enjoyed about TFG was the romance and world-building, you may want to give this a pass; if you prefer the fractured fairy tale concept, then I can almost guarantee you will enjoy this novel.Like all the Lackey novels I've read so far, the plot is quite gripping, the characterizations are superb, and the dialogue has a tendency to make me laugh out loud regularly. Lackey specializes in well-rounded and strong female characters, and "One Good Knight" does not disappoint - it's nice to have a "plain" and bookish princess for once (even if the cover artist didn't get the memo, an ongoing gripe I have with this series, see also "The Sleeping Beauty"). If I had one criticism about this book, it would be that some of the ending feels a little rushed and confusing; the pacing at the middle should have been tightened, I think, to allow the ending to flow more naturally. I'm not usually a fan of end-game exposition dumps, but I think a tiny one could have been employed here.I enjoyed this novel immensely, though, and definitely recommend it for fans of the series.~ Ana Mardoll
Wow. Book one in this series, "The Fairy Godmother", was terrific. This second book, however, is a very lackluster follow-up. You'd think that a story about a princess named Andromeda with a mother named Cassiopeia would have just a little bit of the original myth in it. And you'd be completely wrong.It's sad because I think Mercedes Lackey could have turned the Perseus/Andromeda myth into a terrific fantasy, of course peppered with Tradition. Maybe Elena needs help keeping a vain woman from making dangerous bets at the expense of her daughter, or preventing three sisters from becoming Gorgons. Well, nope.Andromeda is the ubiquitous princess who prefers reading books to playing the harp, would rather hang out with her guards than taking dancing lessons, blah blah blah. She envies her kingdom's peasants for their "freedom". STOP IT. Do authors really think any princess in the history of the world ever truly wished to trade a life of luxury for a back-breaking, dangerous life in which you never knew if you'd have a crust of bread for dinner?Oh, and she wears glasses, so naturally she thinks she's plain. And because she wears glasses, she loves books. Thanks for a nerd trope.Anyway, a dragon shows up and Andromeda suggests they offer local girls as sacrifices. WTF? Oh, but it's cool, because she totally feels bad about it. But not bad enough to help the girls defend themselves, which is exactly what she does when her name is selected (guess she doesn't envy the peasants as much as she thought, eh? at least she has access to weapons). A champion shows up to save her at the last minute and things then get a bit weird. (view spoiler)[Human/dragon love? Sounds like something that should be in a different section of the bookstore. I've read books in which dragons also take human shape and that was cool - no different than say werewolf/human love - but falling in love with an animal and then turning him human made me uncomfortable. (hide spoiler)]
Do You like book One Good Knight (2006)?
This book hovers between two and three stars, simply because I found the plot and characters to be rather boring. The characters are all two-dimensional, predictable, and stereotypical, and the hastily contrived romantic ending added nothing to the novel.The real draw of this book - why I liked it despite myself - was "The Tradition," which is a magical force that acts upon the residents of the Five Hundred Kingdoms. Essentially, the Tradition requires that people act as it wants them to: freed maidens always fall in love with their rescuers, the first two sons always fail in the quest, etc. Characters can work with or against the Tradition, mixing the tropes of every fantasy novel together. For example, in order to avoid the compulsion she feels to fall in love with her rescuer, the princess makes a blood sibling oath with him; immediately the compulsion is lifted, and they travel onward. For someone who has read an embarrassing amount of fantasy in the past, this was an amusing and fresh take on the cliches of every fantasy. I just wish the plot and characters could have drawn more of my interest.
—Emily
Okay. So I generally -love- Lackey's writing, but I found that the first half of this story just dragged. I realize that a lot of the beginning info is important, but I wish Lackey could have trimmed it down a bit. It was very dry and struggled through it only for the promise of dragons. Other than that my biggest complaint with this story and the other one I just read (The Subtle Beauty by Ann Hunter), is they add so much other stuff that the romance/love becomes backstage stuff. So it ends up feeling rushed/like it came out of nowhere because neither author took the time to build an actual relationship. :/I still enjoyed both the books and would recommend them/read them again. I was just disappointed by how Lackey addressed the relationships in this book.
—Lindsay Adams
One Good Knight takes place in the Five Hundred Kingdoms world established by The Fairy Godmother. Lackey writes an engaging retelling of the Andromeda sacrifice. Andie, our main character, is a pretty standard Lackey heroine: Spunky, smart, overlooked in intelligence & beauty and yet loved by her commoner friends. Oh yah, and has a mother who secretly hates her and has a dark secret.At the same time, I don't mind the cliches as much as I would otherwise as Lackey has established that she's playing a sandbox where cliche & Tradition is a living force, so all of that makes sense. I liked the mystery set up and I liked some of the side digressions. I was interested in how Lackey handled the Champion coming to Andie's aid without becoming her One True Love. However, it meant that Andie's romance wasn't introduced until page 260 or so of a 450 page book. And the romance wasn't even apparent until more like page 320. I don't have a problem with that per se, except that this was a LUNA book and supposed to have romance as a backbone. As it was, it felt like something more likely to be published as fantasy with the romance tacked on. Additionally, we didn't get a huge amount of lead up for this to have really worked for me in detail. Almost none of the POV from the lover, and yet we had Andie's POV and that of the villians.I'd still recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed Lackey's Fairy Godmother (and Elena does make an appearance here) or to people who enjoy reworking and retelling of fairy tales. But it isn't Lackey's strongest offering and the romance is lacking for anyone seeking that.Though the digression on having democracy in a small midevil kingdom was hilarious.
—Dawn
