A friend who's taste in books is similar to mine has been suggesting I read a couple of books by Patricia Briggs for a while now and though I trust her, I resisted. Why? Because the the protagonist of the books is a guy. Confession time. I read some of just about everything including mysteries, romance, sf, fantasy, literary fiction, light fiction, even some nonfiction. So what's the reading confession? About 80% of my reading features females as the primary protagonists. If a book stars a man, I'm far less likely to pick it up and when I do pick it up, I take a while to read. Does that make me prejudiced? It's not that I don't like the guys when I do read them (as I'm about to prove), I just don't seek them out. Is that wrong? Weird? Unusual?
In this case, resistance was futile since H. lent me her very own well-read copies of the Hurog books by Briggs. First up was Dragon Bones and it set up one of the most original fantasy storylines I've read in a long while. Wardwick of Hurog is heir to Hurog Keep and when his father dies suddenly he expects to inherit. The only problem is the survival mechanism Ward has been using to survive his father. Since a young age Ward has pretended to be a simpleton. His act is so good that his uncle is named his guardian and the Tallvenish King of the Five Kingdoms has declared him unfit. To prove he deserves to inherit the home and land that he loves, Ward sets out to make himself a hero. After all, if he's a hero, no one will think to deny him his rightful place.
I loved Ward so much that I immediately dove into the sequel Dragon Blood and read that in record time. Patricia Briggs (who also wrote a new Urban Fantasy, Moon Called which I liked) is a genius when it comes to characterization. What really impressed me about these two books and the others I immediately went on to glom, was their relative shortness as fantasy novels. With a few sentences we know who Ward is and the same goes for every other character. People do bad things but aren't cartoon villains. Redemption is possible and honor is admirable. Every scene, perhaps every sentence, ties back into the storyline. Nothing is dropped or forgotten. That takes real skill.
So will this change my reading patterns when it comes to male protags? Probably not much, unless Patricia Briggs' name is on the cover of the book.