A knight of the seven kingdoms contains the three novellas The hedge knight, The sworn shield and The mystery knight that all follow a young knight called Dunk and his squire Egg on their journey through Westeros.
"A falling star brings luck to him who sees it, Dunk thought. But the rest of them are all in their pavilions by now, staring up at silk instead of sky. So the luck is mine alone."
I absolutely loved all of the three stories, which are each about 120 pages long. I enjoyed George R.R. Martin's writing as much as I did in all his other books I've read so far. The story has a way lighter tone to it than the A song of ice and fire series, which is so much darker, so reading this was a nice change and an amazing opportunity to visit Westeros without having nearly all your favorite characters killed off.
The plot wasn't extremely intense, but still very exciting with some twists as well. Because of the little time jump between the three stories, we get to see different locations for each one.
The best part are definitely the characters, both major and minor ones. I absolutely love Dunk, it's so refreshing to have him as "hero", since he's just an ordinary young man, who's neither royal nor noble, and has to work hard to achieve anything. He's actually more of a loser, he struggles most of the time and often things go very wrong for him. That doesn't only make him a pretty realistic character, but also allows him to show his personality, which is beautiful. While Dunk's maybe not the smartes guy in Westeros, he's definitely one of the most honorable, positive and kindest one. The second main character Egg is just so cute! You can't help but totally adore his bright and also quirky nature. The relationship between them is simply beautiful. Reading about it made me so happy, and I loved everything about it. I would've loved to see more of the minor characters like Tanselle, The red widow and Lord Bloodraven, but hopefully we'll get to see them in future Dunk and Egg novellas.
When I heard that there's going to be artwork in it, I was honestly quite sceptical at first, probably because I associate books with pictures in them with children's book, even though that's obviously just stupid. But when I started reading and took a closer look at them, I enjoyed them so much and actually found myself pretty much always looking forward to the next drawing. The art is incredibly gorgeous and definitely did add something to the story and made this book a quite new reading experience for me, since basically all books I'm interested in don't have any kind of art in them. (The drawings you can see underneath are some of the biggest in the book, most of them are smaller, but amazing nonetheless.)
A knight of the seven kingdoms is set a bit less than 100 years before the events of A game of thrones, so they obviously don't spoil anything for the A song of ice and fire series, but I'd still advise you to read these books before A knight of the seven kingdoms, since I guess it's really confusing without the knowledge of the world, it's history and the great houses. Of course you can give it a try anyway, even though I think you won't enjoy it as much.
Rating: 5/5 ✹
I'm so sorry for writing way too much, but I just love the world of Westeros so much, so I can't stop talking about (and obsessing over) it. At least I'll try to shut up about it on here until The winds of winter will be published. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this slightly longer review!
Leah
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