Review: Very funny!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 17, 2013
Very funny addition to the Rosehaven series. This reads like a stand-alone, having in common a general style and tone, but otherwise only the fact that Sir Dudley is a member of the Order of Knights that functions as the "Big Bad" in Rise of the Retics.Lantz has a gift for writing POV characters whose supreme lack of self-awareness makes them hilarious to readers, and Sir Dudley is one of these. Lantz is also great at moving seamlessly back and forth between Pythonesque comedy and deadly seriousness. In my opinion, this is also what makes him so good at writing these deceptively YA tales: he doesn't dumb anything down, regardless of the age of his stated target audience.My only real complaints, and why I'm not rating 5 Stars, are 1) I don't entirely buy Sir Dudley's last-minute turn of heart -- something that seems rather important. I didn't see enough in him prior to the final moments that would lead this way. Although to be fair, perhaps more will be revealed in future stories. More importantly 2) this character is a member of what is built up in the full-length Rosehaven Book 1 as a scary order of knights bent on destroying Rosehaven, so to have him be such a comic figure is a bit jarring and inconsistent with the rules of that world, even while the style of the humor is much the same.