Knight of the Dove has a good set-up for a fantasy novel. Amaria Eversvale is a woman with a mysterious past. She is also a knight of some renown in the kingdom of Illidor. When conducting a raid on the rival Erdoth Fortress she calls upon assistance from dark gods. As a result, she single-handedly destroys the fortress. While this makes her a hero in Illidor, it does not sit well in her soul.

As a result, she wanders the land in self imposed exile until she comes to the border village of Valgamin. Valgamin is in need of assistance, but is the tarnished Knight of the Dove the one to provide it?

Amaria is a character in the Elric tradition. A strong, heroic character, but one in need of redemption. Mr. Kooiker has created a good main character.

His secondary characters could use work though. Through the course of the book he draws our attention to Ornan, a middle-eastern type who becomes fast friends with Amaria. But we never really know too much about him. Both Amaria and Ornan are single and lonely. Their friendship is more brother/sisterly love than anything romantic. That works well enough, but it is never really explained why this should be. Perhaps that could have worked if it was left unexplained, but the author keeps mentioning it with ‘for some reason’ as the explanation.

In fact many things happen with ‘for some reason’ as the explanation. This never works. Amaria will have a bad feeling about a new character ‘for some reason.’ Perhaps it would have worked better if the author used words of description for these characters that could show us that they are untrustworthy without resorting to ‘he rubbed Amaria the wrong way for some reason’ or ‘there was something about the man Amaria didn’t like.’

I would have liked a lot more foreshadowing in the book. Amaria is introduced under very mysterious circumstances and then she goes on as the main character without her background really being touched on any further. Then suddenly at the end in a very Perry Mason like fashion all is revealed.

There was a budding romance in the book that I thought was handled very well. The author did a very good job of showing rather than telling.

Mr. Kooiker narrates the story in a pseudo-archaic style that actually works pretty well, though occasionally an anachronistic modern word (like ‘mom’ for instance) will pop-up and temporarily derail the narrative.

Sometimes a weird choice of words will also cause the reader to stumble. After a thrilling duel, Amaria discovers that a hidden army of evil soldiers has been causing havoc while she was away. She rushes back to Valgamin and sees the evil soldiers ‘milling about’. A big (and satisfying) battle follows, but that phrase ‘milling about’ served to drain the excitement the author otherwise built.

One last thing about the narration. Amaria is often described as ‘the woman.’ I understand that perhaps the author didn’t want to overuse ‘she’ and ‘her’, but almost every time Amaria was described as ‘the woman’, ‘she’ or ‘her’ would have worked better.

I should say though that the author has a real talent for well written battle scenes. There were both large scale battles and one-on-one duels throughout the story. These scenes are uniformly well written and exciting. I can tell you that when some characters are duking it out, you will not want to put the book down.

He is also particularly good at world building. Knight of the Dove is a standalone story, but the world (or at least the parts important to the story) are handled very well. There are some fuzzy bits (like why the two kingdoms were fighting in the beginning) but overall his world is described well.

He also does an excellent job with the supernatural elements of his story. The pantheon of gods was very interesting to me. I enjoyed reading about their pasts, their motivations and their rivalries. I also liked the way wizards were portrayed in the story. Very powerful and somewhat removed, these magic users seemed all-powerful and not at all like stock characters from a role-playing game.

The pacing of the book is a problem. There is a very good prologue dealing with the assault on Erdoth fortress (which was originally published as a separate short story) and then there is a prelude which sums up what you have just read. I got the feeling that both weren’t supposed to be included in the book.

After the bit at the fortress the book sort of loses its’ way and wanders with Amaria. Things pick up a bit when the city council of Valgamin requests a favor, but the book for me didn’t really get rolling until the final third when Amaria leads an expedition into the mountains at the edge of her world. Once that was started, it was a series of long reads for me, because I wanted to see what would happen next.

The ending is exactly as it should be. All questions the story asked are answered, yet there is room for a sequel if Mr. Kooiker decides to see what else the Knight of the Dove can get into. He is a promising author and his creativity is great. However his narrative skills really need more polish to shine.

Overall I liked this book. It’s an early work and could really stand to be tightened up and edited quite a bit, but the ideas presented were pretty interesting. I think if he can hook up with a really good editor he will be a fantasy author to watch. ( )