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Review: In The Eye of Heaven by David Keck

I bought the mmpb version of In the Eye of Heaven by David Keck last year, but held off on reading it do to the mixed reaction i read on the internet. For some reason, I decided to give it a go over the Memorial Day holiday, and boy am I glad I did.

First off, I totally understand why this book is polarizing. His writing style is something you will either love or hate. Me, I LOVED it. This isn't a case where you will see me say "read the first 100 pages to before forming an opinion". For this book, all you need to do is read the first chapter, which is 10 pages long in the mmpb. At that point, if you like what you read, you will enjoy the rest. If you found the language too hard to read, or stilted, or otherwise unappealing, you aren't going to be interested in the rest. This book is pretty unique in that regard. You really have to enjoy the author's writing style to enjoy the book. Like I mentioned above, I loved it, and took to it immediately. By the end of Chapter 1, I knew I was going to read this book til the end. The best way I can think of to describe the author's style is cinematic, but without being too wordy. In fact, many of the sentences are short, and almost choppy. But with the way Keck uses words, this shorter, sometimes abrupt sentence structure works. For me, the writing was very visual, and he does a great job of conveying sounds, too (and not in the Modesitt way of using "WHACK" or "frrrp" or things of the sort). I found myself reading the book as much for the wording as for the story. There are even moments of humor, which were due more to the choice of words the author used, then to the situation being described.

So, while the writing was great for me, the story was almost as good, but not quite. The writing style worked better for describing the current scene, than it did when trying to fill in history and back story. Quite often I found myself struggling to understand the implications of some portions of the story, and the characters often understood things before I did. My other nit pick was that Durand was in a situation to be the hero a little too often. On the plus side for the story, i loved the characters and characterization. And I thought he did a great job with the dialogue among the knights. I really felt "this is how knights would talk to (and treat) each other". Much of the story is spent watching Durand and his band fight in Knightly tournaments, which was a nice change of pace.

All this being said, I would rate this book as one of my favorite reads of 2009, and I wish I had read it sooner. I plan to find a hardcover copy for my collection, as I see myself wanting to read this one again in the future. As for my recommendation, if you click the Amazon widget (which you Google Reader folks probably can't see) or the link in the book title at the top of the post, you can visit the Amazon page for this book. The reason I recommend that here is that Amazon has a "look inside" feature for this book, and you can read the first 5 pages of chapter 1. And quite honestly, my review can be boiled down to this: if those 5 sample pages work for you, get this book right away. If they don't, go ahead and mark this one off your list. If the writing style does work for you, I think you will really enjoy In The Eye of Heaven.