A review by bent
Hawkwood's Voyage by Paul Kearney
2.0
This didn't blow me away. I thought some of the battle scenes were good and the settings were cool, and there was enough there to keep me reading, but there was a lot of dreck as well. Kearney obviously knows a lot about ships and sailing terminology, but makes the cardinal mistake of trying to include it all in his book. It gets tiresome.
I know very little about military tactics, but almost everything the Merduks do after conquering Aekir seems to make very little sense. Their strategies, their logistics - I question how much thought went into plotting it all out. It reminds me of old-time action movies where the hero can shoot thousands of bullets without ever re-loading. A lot of the political maneuvering also comes off as very ham-handed and ill-thought out. Not diplomatic at all.
I thought Kearney probably shouldn't have bothered trying to write female characters because he sucks at it - the frigid, barren wife; the hot, fertile, manipulative whore; the overweight, mustachioed busybody (who appears off-page). Very two-dimensional archetypes. Corfe's wife makes two appearances - one as the reluctant captive of the Merduks, one as the concubine-soon-to-be-wife of the their leader. What literary purpose she serves is unclear, although she resigns herself to her fate as concubine because once the Merduks have raped her, she is unclean and unfit for Corfe (her own interpretation). Hey, there's the madonna/whore thing again! The only other female character is a girl werewolf who comes off OK, although she's described as very boyish in her looks, so maybe that's why she gets a little more personality.
There's a weird undercurrent of homosexuality/homophobia here that I don't have the psychology to understand. Hawkwood gets very angry at being accused of buggering cabin boys, even though he did bugger the cabin boy, several men are attracted to the fairly boyish werewolf girl, who physically reminds Hawkwood of the cabin boy. Both the girl and the cabin boy end up sharing a similar fate, which I bet a psychologist could have a field day with.
Obviously this book sets up for a sequel. I think it's probably also pretty obvious from this review that I won't be reading the sequel. I would give this book a miss.
I know very little about military tactics, but almost everything the Merduks do after conquering Aekir seems to make very little sense. Their strategies, their logistics - I question how much thought went into plotting it all out. It reminds me of old-time action movies where the hero can shoot thousands of bullets without ever re-loading. A lot of the political maneuvering also comes off as very ham-handed and ill-thought out. Not diplomatic at all.
I thought Kearney probably shouldn't have bothered trying to write female characters because he sucks at it - the frigid, barren wife; the hot, fertile, manipulative whore; the overweight, mustachioed busybody (who appears off-page). Very two-dimensional archetypes. Corfe's wife makes two appearances - one as the reluctant captive of the Merduks, one as the concubine-soon-to-be-wife of the their leader. What literary purpose she serves is unclear, although she resigns herself to her fate as concubine because once the Merduks have raped her, she is unclean and unfit for Corfe (her own interpretation). Hey, there's the madonna/whore thing again! The only other female character is a girl werewolf who comes off OK, although she's described as very boyish in her looks, so maybe that's why she gets a little more personality.
There's a weird undercurrent of homosexuality/homophobia here that I don't have the psychology to understand. Hawkwood gets very angry at being accused of buggering cabin boys, even though he did bugger the cabin boy, several men are attracted to the fairly boyish werewolf girl, who physically reminds Hawkwood of the cabin boy. Both the girl and the cabin boy end up sharing a similar fate, which I bet a psychologist could have a field day with.
Obviously this book sets up for a sequel. I think it's probably also pretty obvious from this review that I won't be reading the sequel. I would give this book a miss.