Labyrinth - Kate Mosse

Orion, 2006, 694 pages + extras

ISBN: 0-7528-6554-4
Read: April-May, 2018, Age 40

I didn't much like the book.  Besides being overwritten and bloated, about one third of a page pretty much ruined the book for me.  I'll quote it in full after the break - it's rather short, but there are an amazing amount of problems with it.


(our heroine is speaking to the groom, as in the guy who takes care of the horses)

   "'The blade is dull,' she said.
   Their eyes met.  Without a word, Amiel [the groom] took the sword and carried it to the anvil in the forge.  The fire was burning, stoked all night and all day by a succession of boys barely big enough to transport the heavy, spiky bundles of brushwood from one side of the smithy to the other.
  Alais [our heroine] watched as sparks flew from the stone, seeing the tension in Amiel's shoulders as he brought the hammer down on the blade, sharpening, flattening, and rebalancing.

So, neglecting to worry about why our heroine in 13th century France has a sword tucked behind her headboard and knows how to use it, let's unpack this little bit of the story.


To start with, and this is not super obvious without context, but this sequence is completely unnecessary to the story - it's already been established that our heroine is friends with the staff and servants at the castle she's living in.

Next - you don't give a sword to a groom to sharpen.  Give it to someone who knows something about swords.  Merely having a Y chromosome and being a servant doesn't mean that you can work with steel.

The groom certainly shouldn't use a hammer to sharpen the sword - he should be using a grindstone or a whetstone.

'Sparks flying from the stone' is good, but I'm not sure what is stone - the hammer, or the anvil.  Neither should be stone.

And a forge running on spiky brushwood won't get hot enough for iron. 

I'm not sure that there was anything right in the sequence, and I'm sure there's more that I didn't point out. And that's the reason this stretch was so bad for me.   Up to here, I was mostly enjoying the setup - it was an interesting premise, and the characters were all right - so despite some bloat, it was an ok start.  But from here on out, I no longer trusted the author, so instead of happily watching the story, I kept looking for problems (and finding them) and couldn't just sit back and enjoy the story.

Because of that lack of faith, I'm unlikely to read anything else by this author.

Rating: 2