479 pages
Published 2022
Read from October 2 to October 5
Rating: 3 out of 5
This is a self-published New Adult fantasy about a deeply traumatized college student setting out into a Legally Distinct From Dungeons & Dragons world to rescue her friend and confront the evil mage who snatched her away from Michigan one fateful night ten years before. I like the idea of supporting self-published titles; someday I'll likely take the self-pub route with my own novellas, maybe even my own novels. It's hard to discover self-pub titles that I'll actually read, though. I've bought a handful of self-published books over the last year, and just haven't been able to power through and finish them; the prose has always been too iffy for my snobbish tastes. (One exception worth mentioning: Cute Mutants.)
Knight's prose is decent, as good as anything you'd find in most modern YA fantasy (though if I never read the words "sneer" and "smirk" again, it will be too soon). The story is absorbing and does exactly what it says on the label, plunging our heroes into fights with goblins, into dingy taverns with bad food, brushes with the royal guard, and an epic quest to retrieve a Maguffin and save their friend while saving the world. It was perfectly satisfactory in that regard.
I did find it a bit off-putting that every human, elf, and halfling character is coded as white -- most of them with blue eyes; some of them singled out as "pale white" -- except for one guy coded as Japanese, who (spoilers!) turns out to be morally suspect. I'm guessing it was an unconscious oversight, or perhaps a conscious effort to avoid appropriation. (One might position Check as the diametric opposite of Wake of Vultures, another fantasy written by a white woman, and an example of well-intentioned but perhaps dubious "I'll take it upon myself to write diverse characters" saviorism.) I'm in favor of avoiding appropriation, but making every character white -- humans from a fantasy world setting as well as humans from a city in Michigan -- swings way too far in the opposite direction.
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