Hi friends and happy Wednesday! I hope you’re well! Today I’m posting my review of Jes Battis’ novel, The Winter Knight.

This book was long-listed for Canada Reads 2024.

The Winter Knight by: Jes Battis: In Vancouver, The Knights of the Round Table still very much exist, but they’re winding up dead. Hildie, a Valkyrie, is the investigator on the case and one of her main suspects is Wayne, the reincarnate of Sir Gawain. When Wayne finds himself at the scene of the crime, this leads him to start questioning his medieval family history. Hildie’s other suspect is Bert, who happens to be Wayne’s new boyfriend. In order to get to the truth, vicious forces must be faced and secrets revealed. A modern day King Arthur retelling that had a lot of potential to be a really cool and fascinating read, but it fell flat for this reader. Firstly, it took a while to get into the story, there were a lot of back and forth and questions about how these characters related to King Arthur. Even as they neared the ending it was still a little confusing and it was also a little confusing how each of the characters were connected to one another. The world was never really explained and so we’re supposed to go on what the characters were doing to understand them and their ranks and it just left us kinda perplexed about what was happening. Secondly, the reader had a hard time connecting to the characters; they wanted to like them, but there wasn’t anything that made us feel for them. Sure, they were greatly developed and their representation was well done, but they just didn’t click with this reader, and because of that, it made it hard to care about the plot and anything happening. There would be moments throughout that the reader felt that potential come to the surface, but it quickly went away when a point of view would change. Speaking of, the way this ended, in the typical fashion of even shorter chapters with multiple switches in points of view was definitely a device to advance and move the plot along. The reader doesn’t feel like it worked all that well because we started to get points of view from characters who the reader didn’t feel brought a lot to the story. If anything, they were characters briefly mentioned and now were being used to solidify how this would all end, and it felt like the author was grasping at a way to come to a conclusion. In the end, this was well written, the amount of pop culture references the author managed to fit into this book was quite astounding, and had some great representation, but the characters didn’t work so it made the story fall apart.