Description:

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The teenage boy who wandered into another set of realities in Wolfe's The Knight has attained his ambition of knighthood. Now, as Sir Able of the High Heart, he returns in this sequel riding a steed that's not a horse, wielding his magic sword and bound by oath not to use his new otherworldly powers. Such a summary is like saying a spoonful of tap water constitutes the whole of all oceans. Wolfe's words wash over the reader with transparent grace and charming playfulness as he spins his profoundly imaginative, metaphysically complex, yet ever-entertaining tale with astonishing naturalness. In trademark Wolfian fashion, the memory-altered protagonist acts as narrator, telling the truth whenever possible and to the full extent of his own understanding. This second volume satisfactorily supplies many answers to the riddles and allusions of its tantalizing predecessor, but posits new mysteries as well. The novel stands alone and might even be best if read before The Knight, but will surely drive readers to the first as well. The conclusion hints at possible further adventures. Outstanding fantasy these days is often convincingly and compellingly anti-Tolkien, but Wolfe proves one can tell an epic, myth-based story of honor, loyalty, courage and faith relevant to our own dark times. This is fantasy at its best: revelatory and inspirational.
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From

Starred Review The second volume of the Wizard Knight concludes the story begun in The Knight [BKL D 15 03] by first bringing Sir Able back after 20 years in limbo, with his maturity and prowess increased. He is promptly dragged into a welter of murderous intrigues when somebody murders the king of the giants. The scramble to find the culprits and the intrigues involved in the succession eventuate in a complex, even convoluted tale, with so many characters and subplots that a proper summary would far exceed the limits of a Booklist review. Eventually, Sir Able slays dragons, preserves his honor, allows other knights to preserve theirs, rescues the virtuous and sets down the vicious while trying to tell the one from the other, and ends up being restored to his true love in a world strongly redolent of that of the Arthurian legends. But there is hardly a piece of northern European heroic literature from which Wolfe doesn't borrow with his usual scholarly flare and in his exquisitely turned prose (in Wolfe's hands, even dialect works). Arising from the same sources as Lord of the Rings, the Wizard Knight is one of the few fantasies that can justly be compared with it. Roland Green
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