Rant Review: "The Winter Knight" by Jes Battis

Quick Summary

Type: Novel

Genre: Fiction, fantasy, LGBTQIA+

Summary: "Arthurian legends are reborn in this upbeat queer urban fantasy with a mystery at its heart." Read Time: 6 days

Rating: 1 star

Review

Note: I started this review while still reading the book so I could get all my thoughts down on it. There was so much I disliked about this book that I knew that if I did not start taking notes early, I would forget a lot of the details that made me not like the book.

The novel starts off with a murder and yet, I wasn't hooked in the least. Since Hildie says someone is going to die, all sense of suspense and surprised is removed.

It's also exhausting to read. Whereas with other books, I'm able to read multiple chapters per day and finish the books in a few days, I can only manage a single chapter per day at most. After four chapters, I felt like nothing had happened - despite a murder happening at the end of the first chapter.

Clearly, this book is attempting to be a character-driven story. I understand that. And maybe I just don't like character-driven stories. But this one is failing to get me interested in any of the characters.

I also don't like how social issues are being forced into the story. I like social and political issues in my stories when they arise naturally (take, for example, The Hate U Give - a book all about social, economic, and political issues). But the way social issues (for example, women's rights, disability rights, etc.) are shoehorned in feels a little more like faux-gressive virtue signaling. For example, in chapter 4, Kai says something to the effect of: "I'm off to conquer Java in an anti-colonial way." At no point was colonialism brought up, so this line just feels forced. So do the many, many instances of men leering after Kai brought up in that same chapter. Yes, that happens, but not nearly as often as portrayed in that chapter.

In later chapters, colonialism does get brought up again (in terms of white people stealing First Nations land) but every time, it feels very forced. It does not come up naturally at all.

The dialogue also strikes me as unrealistic. It feels like an attempt at college-student casual speech mixed with purple prose, and it doesn't work. I don't know anyone who talks like that.

The pop culture references are also tiring. When I write, I do my best to avoid pop culture references because it dates my writing in a bad way. It can also become a crutch. In The Winter Knight, not only do the references feel like a crutch, but references to artists like Charli XCX or songs like "Levitating" (Dua Lipa) - who were relevant for a brief window and forgotten - are jarring because it no longer feels like the story is taking place in the moment. The other issue with the pop culture references is that it starts to feel like the author is using them so that he doesn't actually have to give his characters any real personality. But it doesn't work. Finally, there are so many pop culture references that no one is going to get all of them, which only serves to alienate the reader when something is referenced like it should be common knowledge, but the reader has never heard of it. For example, I don't listen to podcasts, so every time a podcast is mentioned by name, I feel out-of-the-loop and annoyed.

Another issue with the narrative is that whenever things start happening, the narrator - whether it be Hildie or Wayne - goes on an unrelated tangent, completely halting the action. For example, in chapter 6, Wayne and Kai start running after a fox. They're sprinting after this fox - a physical manifestation of their fairy tale? - and all of a sudden, as they're running, Wayne starts thinking about learning to ride a bike and his Uncle Lance. Why? What does that bring to the narrative? All it does is arrest the action and shatter my interest. I don't want to know about Uncle Lance helping Wayne ride a bike, I want to know where the fox is going. And while we're on chapter 6, students don't drink vodka from coffee mugs during the day on campus. Has the author never been to a college campus?

I also have been having trouble figuring out why valkyries are included in this story. Supposedly, these are the reincarnations of Arthurian myths, but valkyries are an Old Norse invention. They are briefly mentioned in some Old English texts (according to Wikipedia), but the equivalent term (wælcyrġe) seems to be a borrowed term that serves as a catch-all for 'goddess' (seemingly foreign). So why are there valkyries in this story?

There are also occasional glaring inaccuracies that take me out of the story. For example, in chapter 7, the author makes the following claim about a house on campus: "Historians speculated that it was the oldest residence in Canada". Now, the author does concede that any surviving First Nations residences would predate this house, but even counting just colonial residences, no residence in British Colombia is going to come close to being as old as the earliest surviving residence in Quebec or Ontario. The oldest surviving (colonial) residence in Canada is (from what I can tell) is Maison Puiseaux, a residence in Quebec City built in 1638.

For whatever reason, chapter 8 starts in the present. So far, it's the only section of the book written in the present rather than the past. Originally, I thought it was a different way of distinguishing an important past memory. But in the middle of the memory, the tense goes back to the past. It doesn't feel deliberate - it feels like a mistake.

Then in chapter 9, we get yet another memory - Hildie's this time - before abruptly switching to a conversation between Hildie and her mother. I can't figure out what the point of the memory was, and the conversation between Hildie and Grace felt very forced. Hildie knows she has screwed up, but turns the conversation from one about the investigation - interesting, the plot I'm hoping for - to an argument about how Hildie feels trapped (which would be interesting if we didn't hear about how trapped Hildie feels during literally every single scene Hildie is in).

By the end of chapter 11, we have another twist - another knight is dead! Except since I care so little about any of the characters or the investigation, I don't care about this new death.

Now onto chapter 14. As with most of Wayne's chapters, this chapter has nothing to do with the actual plot. It's just more of Wayne going through life. But it does bring up something that really annoys me. Now, I want to preface this by saying that I have been diagnosed with ADHD. I am, as they say, neurodivergent. And there are a few things that really bug me when it comes to neurodivergence. The first is, I hate when people self-diagnose. I understand that it is incredibly hard to get a diagnosis and the resources that come with diagnosis, but you can't say "I'm autistic" without getting a diagnosis. Autism shares many traits with different mental health and/or neurological issues. Second, I hate it when people make their mental health issues their identity, which is what it feels like Wayne is doing. I don't know much about Wayne, and I'm 30% into this book. You know what I do know about him? He's a knight (Gawain) and he has anxiety, panic attacks, is self-diagnosed with autism, and is gay. Those seem to be the things central to his identity and personality, which make him a very flat character. If he were a real-life person, I wouldn't want to hang out with him for precisely that reason - he has no personality. In fact, I ended friendships with people who made their sexuality and mental health issues the main facet of their personality. It was all they would talk about, and it made hanging out with them an exercise in tedium. It is not an attractive trait.

A little past the halfway mark of the book, the plot picks up - about damn time. The paths of the two POV characters meet, something exciting happens, and for the first time in this book, my interest is actually piqued. Then almost immediately, it's over. And while the aftermath is touched upon, what does Hildie spend the next chapter doing? Thinking about her grandmother and arguing with her mother. Not even about things that directly relate to the attack. Just a musing about how much Hildie's cats are like her Nan, and the same tired old "I'm a victim because you forced me into this life" argument from Hildie. I was shocked when I learned that Hildie is in her 30s. She sounds so much like a petulant eighteen- or nineteen-year-old.

In the following chapter, we get this line: "The [middle] school's gay-straight alliance hadn't known what to do with this odd friendship between a trans girl and a socially awkward kid still in the closet." I have so many questions about this line. Why would a school's GSA be confused about a trans kid having friends? What makes this friendship so odd? Is it Wayne's social awkwardness? This sentence makes no sense. Also, this is the first time we learn that Kai is trans. Given that this is probably central to Kai's identity, these are the social issues that should have been brought up, rather than shoehorning anti-colonialism into a context in which the discussion of anti-colonialism didn't make sense. In any case, the referenced sentence seems to just be a way to talk once more about how Kai and Wayne are such outsiders (although to my knowledge, Vancouver in the late 2010s was fairly liberal). I know I live in a very LGBTQIA+ forward area so some things seem normal to me, but I have to imagine that even in Vancouver, a trans kid and an awkward kid being friends wouldn't be all too weird because - you guessed it - people make friends. They see past gender issues and awkwardness. This sentence confuses me.

In the same chapter, we also get a lot of unnecessary scenes. Wayne and Kai are visiting people in Victoria, one of whom is a runesmith, the other a blacksmith. Wayne works with the blacksmith to forge his sword. Interesting. But for whatever reason, we always get the nothing scenes at night when Wayne and Kai make another tired pop culture reference (a cartoon and a podcast this time). These add nothing to the story, they add nothing to the characters. They are unnecessary and they interrupt the interesting stuff, which just leads to frustration.

Finally, just past the 75% mark, the book picks up for real (I'm not counting the fight with the Boba Fett knight because that was so brief and felt so unimportant). We now know who the villain/murderer is, and while I know I'm supposed to feel shocked and betrayed, I feel...nothing. I didn't even feel anything when Shar or Wayne were kidnapped because the author has failed to make me care about any of the characters thus far (and I'm 3/4 through the book!). I'm at the point where I just desperately want to be done with this book so badly, and I almost regret not DNFing it at the beginning when I could already tell it wouldn't be my cup of tea.

The majority of the book has focused on Wayne and Hildie. But now, in chapter 29, we suddenly get the story from Kai's point of view. Why? Why break from such a well-established pattern? It feels like the author wrote himself into a corner and the only way to move the story forward was by focusing on Kai. That being said, it only succeeds in annoying me because this is a character I don't know at all whose POV I don't care for. Not only that, but instead of just getting on with the story - we are 85% done with the book, after all - we of course have to stop the action a moment so we can reminisce about Kai's childhood. So once again, we've gone from interesting to boring. And nothing happens! Kai doesn't do anything but reminisce! What was the point of her chapter?

And then another chapter with a different POV, this time from Vera. It's definitely feeling more and more like the author got stuck and the only way to get out of his stuck-ness was to use other people's POVs. This doesn't feel like a deliberate choice, but rather a desperate necessity to salvage the story. And of course, even though Vera is charging at Lance with a sword in her hands, she's not focused on the battle that's about to happen, or saving her nephew or the future. No. Of course not. She's reminiscing about how it feels to see Lance again. So once again, an exciting, fast-paced moment is interrupted by inaction. It's incredibly frustrating.

The end of the book (minus the epilogue) was by far the best part of the story - although that's a low bar. The epilogue was totally unnecessary, though.

Good Lord, this book was hard to read. I'm relieved it's over.