ARC Review: The Parsley Knight by Dan Ackerman
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Horse rating: 🐴🐴 of five horses
ARC difficulty: pancake
Expected publication: July 1st, 2022
DNF at 15%
The blurb sounded really neat, but unfortunately all of that was pretty much done with in the first 5%. Why this is 500 pages, I do not know.
• Pretty much everything is glossed over. Things just sort of happen to parsley knight, he rarely seems to have any agency. There's a lot of telling about things, without showing them happening. The scenes are short since nothing is expanded on, which leaves the book feeling very choppy.
• The world building leaves much to be desired - what on earth is going on? There's the fae Otherworld, some sort of semi-fantasy "real" world(?) where Christianity is still a thing....uhhh. There's magic, a couple different kinds, but that's not explored. Lots of lore dumping, but without context it's all just noise. Even their constant jaunts around fae world are just a list of places, because we only see like one in five.
• Which also leads me to the point where I dislike when fantasy books add homophobia in. You've made up an entire world, why did you add this back in? It also doesn't seem to matter ultimately, because parlsey man is like "but gay will make me burn in hell....but hes hot tho so i guess i dont care"
...right.
• There's no depth to the characters or their emotions or their thought processes. Parlsey man has a strong response to killing a dude (idk how you become a knight without seeing bloodshed) and the solution is to just groom a horse. Yay?
• The romance.....uh no. The lack of emotional depth, or honestly any characterization, means they have instalove. I don't understand why they're attracted to each other, why they're together, why I should buy into it, anything. It's just another thing that happens. We gloss over all sorts of scenes where we could see them getting to know each other, but it's just a few sentences in retrospect.
Overall, basically everything happens passively off page. The characters are flat, their connection is unbelievable, and the world is a confusing pile of words. I do not know why parsley, I even word searched it and I still do not know.
I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. All the opinions are my own.
The Parsley Knight on Amazon
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