Monday Review: The Duelists by Julia Knight
Well, the first two entries anyway. Number three, Warlords and Wastrels is scheduled for release on December 15th. I plan on interrupting my binge of the available Expanse books to partake immediately.
I just can’t resist the buckling of swashes. Ew, get your mind out of the gutter. Yeah, you know it was in there. Gross. Shame on you.
With the successes of Daredevil and Jessica Jones, Netflix has proven the appeal of the binge. All episodes at once, you say? I don’t have to wait a week? I can be instantly gratified provided I don’t have children or a job or need to sleep? And even if I am subject to those things, when I do find the time, I can watch as many episodes as I wish until they run out and then I can watch them all again?
Rad.
As a reader, I often find myself waiting for the next book written by a particular author or in a given series and it is one of the only things in the world that implodes my patience faster than… well, an imploding thing. Jon has given up on The Song of Fire and Ice because the wait between books has gotten so long that, to quote the man, “By the time the next one comes out, I forget what happened and I don’t have time to go back and read five thousand pages. And also, he’s an old, fat, white guy and he’s probably going to pull a Robert Jordan.”
There’s something to be said for waiting of course. Anticipation can be lovely and it isn’t as though there’s any shortage of books in the world to read. But I’ve also enjoyed the times I’ve discovered a series late or consciously decided to wait until it’s reached advanced age (Rivers of London) or been completed (concrete examples elude me, but know I’ve done it) to partake. Of course, in such cases, once you reach the end you’re done; this has actually resulted in the shedding of tears more often than I’d like to admit.
Binging on a book series, however, allows you opportunities interval trained series don’t afford: your brain hasn’t yet detail dumped to make room for other info and you remember what what’s her name is doing with the thing and the stuff with far more clarity. You get to live in a world you love for an extended period (if you don’t love it, you might want to reconsider the binge). Your imaginary friends don’t disappear for months or years at a time, leaving you bereft and alone in the tavern with sinister pirates ogling your booty.
Julia Knight‘s Duelist trilogy is a great binge series. Published by Orbit, the first installment, Swords and Scoundrels was released in October; the second, Legends and Liars in November; and the last, Warlords and Wastrels is schedule for mid-December. A month is exactly the right interval for most people, even those of us who read relatively quickly because life and writing and work and all those other aforementioned tend to get in the way of reading, even when you really, really, really want to read.
What makes the Duelist Trilogy a great binge series? I shall tell you.
The characters: the trilogy follows siblings Kacha and Vocho from fame and honor to disgrace to honor once more. They’re a dynamic pair: Kacha, the assassin with a conscience, Vocho a pretty classic, but extremely well executed, rogue. They bicker, they curse one another, they interfere with one another’s lives, and they always, always have one another’s backs. Katie’s wry exasperation and Vocho’s cheeky snark mean they’re never dull, but the depth of their characters, the delving into what’s beneath it all, keeps them “real.” The secondary players are equally strong and their motivations plausible but, at the same time, motivated by unexpected factors. I’ve read a lot of fantasy in my thirty-seven years; I’m hard to surprise. Several of Knight’s characters did exactly that. And while there were a few times I felt I needed a chart to keep track of the crossing-double crossing-treble crossing that connected them all, it was great fun to watch their histories unfold. I wanted to know more and I wanted to know it now rather than a year from now, or three, or ten. And I got it. Relatively now. Which, in turn, kept me wanting more. Now.
The plot: Revenge. Revolution. Blood magic. Secret marriages and stolen children. Lying and stealing and human trafficking. A thin veneer of honor over something dark and foul. Betrayal for all the right reasons, or reasons that would be right were someone not lying to someone who is, in turn, lying to someone else. Sounds somewhat standard I know, but Knight has a way of weaving it all together, of adding small details that create a truly magnificent world different than anything you’re like to have read about before. Leaving it at night is hard because you want to see what’s going to unfold to the extent I’m pretty sure I dreamed about it. How is Reyes is going to turn on its clockworks and who is going to get crushed in the cogs? Who is the magician going to screw with next? Who is Dom really? Why is the honorable Petri playing both sides to betray everyone? What events will precipitate Kacha to cast aside honor for the promise of revenge? What is Vocho going to say to get himself punched in the face next? Even in moments of calm and pause, the story drives forward relentlessly (a compliment in this case) and to be forced to wait more than a couple weeks for the next bit would bring not the story, but the reader, to a staggering, and entirely unacceptable, halt.
The buckling of swashes: Swashbuckling of the magnitude with which Knight is gifting us, her fortunate readers, is epic by nature. Ever read The Three Musketeers? If you haven’t, I recommend an e-book because an IRL version weighs about ten pounds. Sebastein de Castel’s Greatcoats books? Also massive. Same with Jim Butchers The Aeronaut’s Windlass. And as much as I love all of the aforementioned, I had moments of frustration while reading them because I simply couldn’t carve out large enough chunks of reading time to make discernible progress many days. I found myself needing to backtrack to remind myself of people and places and the things that stuff (these being a fault of my brain, not a fault of the books). Ms. Knight is giving us the same epic scale but she is breaking it down into smaller chunks, chunks we’re more likely to have time to sit with and feel we can enjoy at a more leisurely and yet somehow more compact, pace. The Duelist trilogy could easily have been a single novel but it would have been a weighty tome. Think Daredevil the TV show versus Daredevil the movie. One barrels forward, leaving you breathless. The other went clunk. Not that this would have happened with a single Duelist volume (the writing is far too high quality and the story too much fun for that), but consider the division of the things made both stronger.
Freakin’ brilliant.
Four out of five fingers on the hand of glory for the first two installments of the Duelist trilogy and if the cliff hanger at the end of Legends and Liars is any indication, we’re in for at least as much a hell of a ride in a couple of weeks with Warlords and Wastrels.
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