I had flipped through The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England in a bookstore and decided it didn’t look great. I’m not a big fan of first-person narrating, and I saw a now mildly spoilery part about 2/3 of the way in that seemed dumb, so I put is back. Fast-forward about 6 months and I see the same nook at the library. On a whim, I decided to give it another chance. I’m actually kind of glad that I did.
Our narrator wakes up in a pseudo pre-conquest England with little idea of who he is, where he is, or what’s going on. He knows he had the titular book to help him, but the problem is that it’s exploded and he only has fragments. These are only a few of the mysteries that need unwinding though; our narrator has to figure out not just who he is and where he is; he also need to figure out the problems and mysteries in the world he’s now in, as well as some from where and when he came from. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? are the folks he meets good or bad? Are the memories that occasionally rise up from his past about good or bad people and events? How do all of these things connect? It’s not really spoilers to say that it turns out a lot of the answers are related, and the general reveals of bits and pieces kind of works for the most part.
Characters and the world are also surprisingly interesting for how mildly cliché everything is; there’s a scop, a thane, an old lady, villagers, a foreign missionary, etc. The most consistently present villain (it’s pretty obvious who at least one of the main baddies is from the start) is someone the narrator knows from before, and that past is also kind of tropey. Add in the best friend, love triangle, a very specific kind of personal history, and you kind of know what to expect.
Except that’s not 100% what you get; here’s where the world comes in. Characters are pretty predictable once you know who they really are. The world though is an interesting mix of historical sort of accuracy and fiction, especially if you know some of the early medieval cultural history. There’s a set of gods from a rather different area though one with contact to England in the time period, there’s an interesting re-envisioning of wyrd and wights, the general presence of both technology and magic (both native to the world, though only one really known and practiced in the area our narrator is in), an intriguing prohibition against writing though runes are somehow a known entity, the threat of raids from the sea, and so on. All of these elements allow for unexpected achievements; not so much that what happens isn’t visible from a mile away most of the time, but that how it happens that’s the surprise (and often kind of fun).
The occasional bits from the handbook that the reader gets to see seems to be different than what the narrator has, and they don’t really seem to mean a lot until the narrator has a realization about the handbook ¾ of the way through. It’s still mostly worth it for the cartoony illustrations and general randomness; there’s this odd running gag about worlds with sentient bananas, and tons of small print footnotes of appropriately vague legalese/jargon most people never read in reality.
I think this might be my first Brandon Sanderson (aka Cecil G. Bagsworth III); I don’t usually go for modern epic fantasy. I have to admit, this was kind of a fun story to follow. Still not going to look up anything else by him, but I’m kind of glad I did give this one that second chance.