She plunged her blade into his chest, feeling it grind along his ribs…
Outcast swordfighter, Kyer Halidan, walked out of a cornfield at the age of three. Twenty years later, she leaves her adopted home to discover who put her there. And why.
When she kills a man in a duel, she catches the interest of one of her greatest heroes, who invites her to join his company on a mission. But the man she killed had powerful friends.
Desperate to learn what she knows about their plans, her new enemies pursue her relentlessly. Kyer’s impetuousness and disregard for consequences put the mission, and her life, in jeopardy. But to save a village, and the continent, from a despicable evil, she must choose between adhering to duty and breaking the rules.
Gatekeeper’s Key found its way into my pile for SPFBO and I have to say I’ve been very fortunate in my early reads, this being another that I quite happily read all the way through. Based on the premise and the early pages, I was intrigued. Kyer, our main character, is decisive and yet troubled, her background a mystery and her future uncertain. Very uncertain, as we join her at a point in her journey where… there isn’t really a journey yet. She’s left her home, but has no idea what she’s going to do with herself now except see what happens. Unfortunately, this leads to a plot by coincidence situation that never really gets resolved, leaving the plot and structure of this book by far its weakest link. So, let’s start with what didn’t work for me and then move on to what did.
The plot. At the very beginning of the book, Kyer ends up killing a man in a dual after he keeps propositioning her and won’t take no for an answer, which I can certainly sympathise with, but it just so happens he has something in his possession that some not very nice people want back. It also just so happens that someone else watches her dual and decides he needs her for a mission he’s about to undertake, leaving the following day. Since this mission and the bad guys wanting their stuff back are also coincidentally related and are the core of the book, I was left with the feeling that Kyer wasn’t trying to achieve anything, just falling into things. This is made more so by the fact that both these plotlines are ignored at various times to pursue other random dramas, all of which feel like they’ve been thrown in there just for some conflict to spice up a dull part of the plot.
All this culminated in the feeling there was very little in the way of stakes. Kyer would be attacked, but also always saved, their mission is mentioned briefly in the beginning, but then not even alluded to again until they arrive, with no sense of what failure would mean or would even look like, and the random dramas that happened along the way are either being held over until the next book, or have no consequences. In a lot of ways, it was like reading a D&D campaign, not in the sense that it’s litrpg, rather that it’s a book that chronicles a journey from A to B with a vague idea of the intention at the end and lots of random encounters along the way. Such a thing is probably quite fun to play, but makes for a meandering read with no sense of stakes or tension.
Despite this, the book didn’t feel like it dragged. The tight prose and random encounters meant it always seemed that something was happening, leaving the story is far from dull even if I didn’t feel connected to the outcome. The prose flowed well, too, the sort that pulls you along with it but doesn’t get in the way, where you forget it’s even the medium through which you are engaging with the story. The characters too, while consisting of elves, dwarves, mages and knights in a very traditional way, had enough depth to maintain interest in picking up the book. In fact, the relationships between the various members of the team were the highlight for me, each with their strengths and weaknesses, their foibles and humours. Disparate though they are and wary of Kyer as the newcomer, there’s a developing sense of found family that I loved, especially given many of them seem to have no family left/never had one to begin with. This connected well with the providing nature of their end goal, further enriching the group dynamics.
So! All in all, I enjoyed reading Gatekeeper’s Key (though have no idea why it’s called that since I don’t recall a gatekeeper or a key!) and am tempted to read on with the series to see what happens to this cast of misfit characters as they keep falling into trouble. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a solid fantasy novel, very editorially clean, with a bit of humour, a splash of grim, and a come as you are, meandering approach to plotting that just throws exciting things at the wall to see what sticks.
This review was provided by Devin Madson as part of The Fantasy Inn’s SPFBO 8 contest judging.
