Fantasy Review: The Charnel Prince

Okay, so this review was slightly delayed by the exciting news last Friday, but I still wanted to get my thoughts up on Greg Keyes’ The Charnel Prince. Warning: this review will contain one or two spoilers for the first book in the series, but I’ll try to make the spoilers very slight! I promise they aren’t huge.

The Charnel Prince is the second novel in Keyes’ The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone series. I really enjoyed the first book, The Briar King (and I did a small review on GoodReads here), although I did experience a few hiccups specifically when it came to some of the romance subplots.

There’s never a dull moment in The Charnel Prince. As the second book in the series, Keyes has introduced all of the key players already and has allowed himself the space now to explore the plot. His clean, tight prose gets us moving immediately in the right direction, making the book immediately engaging. The first half of The Briar King was a bit of a slow burn, so this was definitely an improvement.

Everything I loved about the first book is still here. Keyes handles fantasy tropes with a kind of deft ease, paying them their due but always managing to escape the boring cliches. His characters are interesting, flawed, and entirely engaging.

I think it’s very easy to use multi-POV as a kind of shortcut to making a fantasy world seem broader, and as a result it can lack depth, but Keyes handles it well. He also manages to accomplish the one thing that has always interested me about multiple point of view novels: the actions certain characters take are viewed differently depending on which character you’re currently reading. A character might do something that seems entirely reasonable when you’re listening to their approach, but it’s only when you get into another character’s head that you realize perhaps it wasn’t as reasonable as you’d thought.

Changing perception this way, based on character, is so human that I just can’t help but love it. It’s something that Robin Hobb does so well, and I was glad to see it in The Charnel Prince. It really does flesh the characters out and provides a nice touch of humanity despite the fantastical going-ons.

That said, The Charnel Prince isn’t without its flaws. Similar to the first book in the series, I just don’t get the romantic subplots here. In the first novel, a relationship between the knight Neil MeqVren and the princess Fastia developed almost out of nowhere. They shared little more than a paragraph or glance between one another and then nothing for a time. Suddenly, by the end of the book, they were in love. I could stomach that well enough–it was, after all, only a subplot. I took it as perhaps a fleeting infatuation.

But in the second book, their odd love plays an even larger and more confusing role. I appreciate that this subplot could have added more tension to Neil’s chapters in the book, but I don’t think it was fully realized and just left me feeling empty about the whole thing.

Another thing that bothered me in The Charnel Prince is the reliance on fate to get things done. I understand fate as a trope in fantasy and I do think it can be useful and even interesting! I don’t feel that it’s the case here, though. Rather than having destiny add a layer of depth to the plot, it’s instead used as a sort of get-out-of-jail free card. Characters are constantly put into near death situations only to be saved by the hand of fate, sending them the right person at the right time whose role seems to be to act mysterious, get the plot where it needs to be, and disappear.

The reliance on fate was never so heavy handed that it ruined the book for me, but it did leave me feeling a little annoyed with some of the arcs.

Overall: Negative points aside, I did enjoy The Charnel Prince. It was an entertaining ride and even though sometimes the characters were short-changed by unfulfilling subplots and fate, they’re still interesting and entertaining. I’ll certainly be reading the third book in the series.

Learn More: The Charnel Prince on Amazon; Greg Keyes on GoodReads

If you liked this book you might also like: The Princess Bride by William Goldman; Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb