A Warrior Poet

Thursday Already? 

This week is flying by for all sorts of reasons. My leisure reading has been limited but I have managed to read something light and easy. 

When I'm in the mood for a simple historical read I often reach for historical romance and the one mentioned today has been on my kindle queue for a little while. 

I've read other novels by Kathryn Le Veque and have enjoyed them so I thought I'd try this one with the intriguing title of The Warrior Poet. I was also interested after reading about the background research for the story having come in part from the poetic writing of a Sir Christian St. John pf the mid 1200s.

The Warrior Poet was enjoyable but less so than other novels by Kathryn Le Veque, like Lespada. The detail is as well researched as her other novels but there seems a slightly more relaxed style to the writing, and some language use that took me out of the medieval period.    

The Warrior Poet by Kathryn LeVeque 

It’s hard to equate a hulking medieval warrior as also being someone who writes the finest of poetry but Christian St. John is just that – and being the most handsome of warriors puts icing on his cake!  Some medieval knights had chivalrous streaks and without adding spoilers some of the St. Johns come across like that. A feud lasting decades between the St. John family and the neighbouring deGares seems to me to be a very believable concept in the northern England of 1266 A.D.

I enjoyed the tale of how Christian and Gaithlin’s romance develops though there are some aspects which didn’t gel with me so well. The use of ‘Honey’ as an endearment didn’t work for me (though, I believe, there’s documentation on its use from the mid thirteenth century). There were also some viewpoint changes that jolted me from what was mostly an absorbing read. 

Slainthe!