I saw this in the 'New' section at the local library last week, published Great Britain 2012, first U.S. Edition 2013, so not everyone may be familiar with this book. You can see more detailed reviews here:
link
So I will just make some general comments. The basic plot is your typical quest story, a group of western adventurers have to collect 4 white falcons for the Seljuk Turks to ransom a Norman knight captured at Manzikert. The group includes a Greek healer, an exiled Frankish knight, a young mute English falconer, and various others that are picked up along the way. There are no big battles but a lot of skirmishes, ambushes, escapes, chases, etc. Also several surprises along the way, including possibly leaving an opening for a sequel. I would give it about a 6 out of 10, some of the reasons for the rather low ranking are:
1. The book has a map of Europe, Russia, and the Middle East at the beginning, with relevant place names included, so you have a pretty good idea of where the journey will take them. So that is a bit of a spoiler.
2. This is a long book (658 pages) and as some reviews said, it could be shortened by a couple hundred pages by cutting out some episodes along the way. I kept expecting people from some of the episodes to show up later in the book but they never did, so some of them seemed a little pointless except to add some local flavor as they passed from country to country.
3. The cover says 'Hawk Quest: An epic novel of the Norman Conquest'. It has almost nothing to do with the Norman Conquest, and technically they are looking for falcons, not hawks.
4. The author is a falconer and spends a lot of time discussing the falcons with technical terms – if you don't know what a tiercel or a haggard are you may get confused, some more explanation of their training would have come in handy so I didn't have to constantly look terms up to follow what was going on.
5. Some of the writing and punctuation were awkward, for example someone saying 'this place gives me the willies' seems a little out of place, there are some other anachronistic terms that don't seem to fit.
6. Having read the Oathsworn books by Robert Low, including the latest 'Crowbone', 'Hawk Quest' covers a lot of the same territory. Attacked by horse nomads in Russia – check. Attacked by sneaky Laplanders in Norway – check. Untrustworthy, brutal Vikings – check. Sometimes I found myself confusing the two stories.
7. Ending was a little anti-climatic and convoluted, although there were some surprises. The author did throw some Dan Brown religious controversies in which just seemed tacked on at the end. And I was hoping for a big battle for the finale, maybe some villains from earlier in the book turning up at the worst possible time, but none did.
Having said all that, it did keep me plodding ahead for several nights because I wanted to find out how the journey ended. So if you have plenty of free time and are looking for a decent (but not great) dark age/medieval novel, you could give this a try.
begins his series on how to paint a 15mm DBA army well, in a reasonable time frame.
