The Black Hawks by David Wragg – Review

Published: October 3, 2019

Publisher: HarperVoyager

Series: Articles of Faith #1

Genre: Fantasy

Pages: 421 (Paperback)

My Rating: 3.0/5.0

Synopsis:

Dark, thrilling, and hilarious, The Black Hawks is an epic adventure perfect for fans of Joe Abercrombie and Scott Lynch.

Life as a knight is not what Vedren Chel imagined. Bound by oath to a dead-end job in the service of a lazy step-uncle, Chel no longer dreams of glory – he dreams of going home.

When invaders throw the kingdom into turmoil, Chel finds opportunity in the chaos: if he escorts a stranded prince to safety, Chel will be released from his oath.

All he has to do is drag the brat from one side of the country to the other, through war and wilderness, chased all the way by ruthless assassins.

With killers on your trail, you need killers watching your back. You need the Black Hawk Company – mercenaries, fighters without equal, a squabbling, scrapping pack of rogues.

Prepare to join the Black Hawks.

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I picked up the audiobook for this last month and was pretty excited to check it out. Synopsis? Good. Cover? Pretty Cool. Reviews? Not Bad. But guess who just didn’t love it… yep, me. I was incredibly disappointed because it says right in the synopsis “perfect for fans of Joe Abercrombie and Scott Lynch” and that’s MEEEEE. I don’t really see the Scott Lynch comparison working, but it has the same bleakness as Abercrombie but I failed to love the characters as much.

I’m actually struggling to remember all the plot details and what exactly I thought of the book. It just didn’t stand out from the crowd of fantasy books. Perhaps this would have worked better for me in print because the narration made it feel monochromatic. No life to the story telling.

Vedren Chel (our MC) was a decent sort. He was quite dedicated to protecting the fairly useless prince he attached himself to despite the fact that this only put him in further danger. The Black Hawk mercenary group was sort of generically tough, with scary sounding names like Spider and Lemon. People were trying to kill them and they found themselves running from death at every turn. 

I was almost bored to death about 25% in, but I had a lot of cooking to do and needed something to listen to whilst I chopped, sauteed, and cleaned up. I trudged through the boring bits and lo, it started to liven up in the latter half. I started to care about what was going on (not that I can remember much now though). I will admit to loving Lemon from the start because of her angry Scots-ish ranting and swearing. It was hilarious and brightened up my attitude towards the whole book.

Long story short, it was good enough for me to finish out the book but probably not good enough for me to continue the series. Unless of course someone starts handing out rave reviews. I might even pick up the series in print at some point because I think the narration lent to my lack of enthusiasm.