Blackheart Knights

Blackheart Knights is a book that I’ve been highly anticipating ever since I heard about it. You know those books where the concept alone is just immaculate, but then you open them and everything else about them is immaculate too? This was one of those for me.

The book follows two different timelines: Art, years in the past, who is about to be named king, and Red, just a few months before the present day. Both of which are steadily converging on a single point, although for a long time it’s not clear just what that is. It’s the kind of book you just have to immerse yourself in and let it carry you to its conclusion.

Because that’s probably the best thing about this book, the way it draws you in and keeps you hooked. You don’t know — and you won’t know for a long while — how the two stories link together (although you may have guesses, given who the characters are supposed to be), but the story does an excellent job of keeping you engaged, by giving you a world that you can all but feel.

It’s also helped by the fact that the characters are all great. You can’t help but love them from the start, even as you know they’re heading towards tragedy. Actually, a great strength of this book is that it makes you believe that maybe things will work out. Maybe this won’t be the normal Arthurian tale. Or that could just be me and my vain hopes.

As such, the ending took me completely by surprise (yeah, okay, it shouldn’t have really). It’s the kind you read with slowly growing horror (in a good way), as everything falls down around you, and tears start streaming down your face, because you know what’s coming, finally. But, like I said, that’s probably one of the best parts of the book: I knew where it was going, really, if I thought about it, but I still maintained the hopes it wouldn’t go that way.

And, honestly, I think my original review summed up this book quite well. Basically just ………..fuck.

An attention-grabbing twist on the Arthurian tradition, Blackheart Knights takes you to an alternate-universe London of tough-as-nails trials and avant-garde technology, tail-gaiting between the timelines of antipathetic Art and avengement-geared Red. adrenaline-charged and always kinetic, Blackheart Knights brims with kenspeckle characters, cyberpunk-ish aesthetics, keen-bean companions to kings-in-training, a cabal of celebrity knights to get a kick out of, and a canny amount of backstabbing in the knife-edged contest for the collaring of the crown. metamorphosing a fairly far-flung fancy into a fine-spun, futuristic salute to the signature stars of the lore to reframe a lasting legend with lordly fracas, a fresh form of monetary means and lust-worthy futuristic motorbikes, Eve scripts fight sequences with finesse and shoves the lid off Blackheart Knights' final secrets with a flourish in the rollicking roll towards the story's finale.

Thank you to NetGalley and Quercus Books/Jo Fletcher Books for kindly passing on this ARC! 💫