Review: Strong Lead Character in this Historical Novel
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 20, 2013
"The Fourth Crusade" is a historical adventure novel focusing on the priest-turned-warrior Ruggiero, a native of Barcelona. He has been a member of the Fourth Crusade and seen the brutal devastation of Constantinople--Christians murdering and raping other Christians--and is journeying from there to Barcelona, to share his story with Peter the Second and hopefully convince the ruler to put an end to the horrors of the Crusade.The novel jumps back and forth between Ruggiero's childhood with his family, during which he is forced to join the priesthood by his father, and his arduous journey to Barcelona; once he reaches Barcelona, it alternates back and forth between his conversation with Peter and the story he is telling of his experience in the Crusades.I love historical fiction, and I didn't know much about the Fourth Crusades (or any of the Crusades), and I also love learning new things, so I thought this book would be a good fit for me. I particularly enjoyed the scenes where Ruggiero had just entered the priesthood and was undergoing training, and the overall story entertained me.  The action scenes were exciting and violent without being too graphic, and Ruggiero's interactions with his brother and sister were strongly written and engaging. However, several things bothered me--lots of missing commas and periods after spoken sentences, for one thing. It was also very distracting to have a historical novel use words like "whatever," "buddies," "sucks," etc., as those words were not used then in the way we use them today.I would recommend this novel to fans of historical fiction, but if I were the author I'd go over the book for modern-day slang and remove it so the novel keeps its "period" feeling.