Scan barcode
A review by kenlaan
The King's Buccaneer by Raymond E. Feist
4.0
I enjoyed this much more than the previous book in this duology, Prince of the Blood. A fun adventure with some characters that grew on me (Nakor is my second favorite Feist character, after only Mara).
Keeping this short, this checks all the marks for a good swords-and-sorcery novel. An evil death cult of serpent priests, ship battles and piracy, thrilling sword battles, questionable unsavory allies, strange foreign cities, and the like.
It has the accompanying issues that swords-and-sorcery often do - women are sidelined compared to men (also, a scene near the end where one of the four younger male lead characters mentions how neatly things worked out, with each of them ending up paired with one of the four women, had me groaning a bit), and there's certainly a bit of the Western protagonists gaping at the barbaric ways of the foreign city they find themselves in - but I didn't find myself cringing nearly as much as I did with Prince of the Blood.
I thought this was a good continuation of the larger plot that Feist started in the prior books, whereas most of Prince of the Blood felt pretty standalone. I've had to get used to the way that Feist will jump forward years in between books, resulting in side characters dying of old age and former protagonists growing older and fading to the background.
Keeping this short, this checks all the marks for a good swords-and-sorcery novel. An evil death cult of serpent priests, ship battles and piracy, thrilling sword battles, questionable unsavory allies, strange foreign cities, and the like.
It has the accompanying issues that swords-and-sorcery often do - women are sidelined compared to men (also, a scene near the end where one of the four younger male lead characters mentions how neatly things worked out, with each of them ending up paired with one of the four women, had me groaning a bit), and there's certainly a bit of the Western protagonists gaping at the barbaric ways of the foreign city they find themselves in - but I didn't find myself cringing nearly as much as I did with Prince of the Blood.
I thought this was a good continuation of the larger plot that Feist started in the prior books, whereas most of Prince of the Blood felt pretty standalone. I've had to get used to the way that Feist will jump forward years in between books, resulting in side characters dying of old age and former protagonists growing older and fading to the background.