Love the best-the best in arms, the first in the hall, the finest harpist, and the best chess player. Love those who love themselves, and love all around them.

Every moment in which The Red Knight told Amicia he loved her out of nowhere made me eye-rolled so hard. Also, the romance sub-plot between The Red Knight and Amicia was, in my opinion, so bad it’s like the romance was there because a romance MUST exist. I didn’t find the rest of the cast of characters compelling, and I honestly think the book would’ve benefited if many of them were completely cut out from the story. The only characters (out of so many) that I found to be interesting and worth reading about were The Red Knight, Bad Tom, Jean de Vrailly, Thorn, and Harmodius. However, my main issue with this isn’t in the numbers itself-I don’t mind a lot of POV characters I’ve read plenty of epic fantasy series with a huge number of POV characters that I thoroughly enjoyed-but in how so many of these POV characters felt redundant, unnecessary, or even useless to the plot they didn’t make the book better, they instead slowed down the pacing immensely. We’re talking about at least 20 POV characters here. If you’ve heard of opinions/reviews on The Red Knight, it is very likely that you’ve heard that this book featured a LOT of POV characters, and yeah, this is true. “Men were born without talons, but the claws they forged for themselves were deadlier than anything the Wild might give them.”

This is a thick book, it’s almost 800 pages and 300k words long, and I had to really push myself through almost the entirety of the first half due to several reasons that’s almost 400 pages long of struggling through the narrative. I had a lot of difficulty getting into The Red Knight. The Red Knight follows the story of The Red Knight, most commonly called as Captain, and his group of mercenaries in their mission to protect an Abbess and her nunnery in the battle against the cunning and deadly creatures of The Wild. I mostly enjoyed reading The Red Knight, but I can’t help but feel that this could’ve been so much better for me. I’m not kidding, look up his bibliography he has written at least 40 novels! However, the praises towards this series and the amazing cover arts by Kerem Beyit definitely managed to finalize my decision to start this series. Cameron is a prolific author who has written SO MANY books across multiple genres. This is one of those series that’s so often recommended to me by many fantasy readers, but I have always found the works of Miles Cameron, a pseudonym for Christian Cameron, to be quite intimidating to go start. The Red Knight is the first book in The Traitor Son Cycle by Miles Cameron. Great siege battles and incredibly detailed on how weaponry and armor works, but not gonna lie, I have mixed feelings about The Red Knight. I have a Booktube channel now! Subscribe here.

The Red Knight by Miles Cameron