Title: An Ordinary Knight
Author: H.L. Burke
Series: An Ordinary Knight, #1
Genre: Young Adult Fantasy Adventure/Romance
Age-Range: 12+ (upper middle grade/young adult)
Setting: a fantasy world
Publisher: H.L. Burke
Source: bought with birthday money 🙂
Rating: 3/5 stars
Content: 3/5. Mild romance. There’s one guy who’s sort of a lady-chaser, so. There’s that. Pretty mild violence. No language.
An Ordinary Knight by H.L. Burke
Stuck in a humiliating position as the Royal Kennel Guard, Sir Percy sees little hope for anything other than an obscure fate. After all, in the Kingdom of Ithelia, you need a fairy to guide you to greatness, and fairies just don’t bother with knights like him.
However, when Percy catches the eyes of the sheltered Princess Matilda, his world expands in new and frightening ways.
A victim of an ill-planned Christening, Matty has spent her life in a locked tower, hiding from pixie attacks. Now she’ll do anything to escape. And if that means dragging Percy along for a cross country search for Prince Charming, so be it.
But not all Prince Charmings are what they seem, and as Matty’s plight grows more desperate, Percy finds himself losing his heart. Does a lowly knight have what it takes to uncurse a princess?
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Well … it was still good, but it wasn’t improved too much if at all. You see, H.L. Burke originally published An Ordinary Knight a while back along with another novella. She later removed it from the market and presumably edited it to be re-published … and I see some changes, but not a lot. Or maybe I simply don’t remember the earlier version very well.
First, the info-dumping prologue. Never a good idea. It basically dryly summarizes Sir Percy’s ordinary life up until it stops being ordinary.
Of course, I wouldn’t really call Percy an ordinary knight. He’s very abnormal, in fact. It seems that every knight but him is fairy-gifted. So doesn’t that make him unordinary?
The characters were all right, though at times they seemed a little two-dimensional. The plot was exceptional, and the writing amusing.
On the negative side, Dusty annoyed me, the fairy’s decision seemed sudden and unrealistic, and Mattie … hmm. Could anybody really be that stupid? Especially if they read as much as Mattie supposedly did? If she read a lot, she should know a lot about the world. Or maybe she just read trash. I don’t know. I did find it to be a lot less cheesy, which is good.
Overall, a reasonably entertaining tale, although it isn’t get better than ‘okay’ in my personal opinion.
~Kellyn Roth
