A Great Knight Read

Men in tights...
... never looked so good. At least that's Pepper Marsh's first impression when she attends a jousting competition at the Renaissance Faire in Ontario. An unemployed and unattached software engineer, Pepper has had enough of the computer geeks in her dating pool. She yearns for a man of yore. A man not afraid to stare death in the face and laugh at it. A man with a big lance...

Pepper's cousin has promised to find her a knight in shining armor, on the condition that Pepper walk around in wench garb. With her mind on her embarrassingly revealing bustier, Pepper promptly steps into the path of an oncoming steed... and is rescued by sexy Englishman Walker McPhail. Once the wild man of jousting, Walker has let a brush with death keep him out of the ring. Though his emotions are clad in almost impenetrable armor, Pepper finds Walker infuriatingly sexy- and she’s about to go medieval on his heart...

Title: Hard Day’s Knight
Author: Katie MacAlister
Published: 2005
Publisher: Signet Eclipse
Pages: 346
Genre: Romance-Contemporary

Saucy, quirky, and fun would be the best way to describe any good wench and of course any Katie MacAlister book! This is especially true in her contemporary romance Hard Day’s Knight which is set in a present day Renaissance festival complete with jousting of course.

I’ve actually never had the pleasure of going to a Renaissance Fair before but MacAlister did a good job of making the audience feel like the setting was very real. I do however think she went a little too far into some details that I could have cared less about but I suppose someone would have complained about it if she hadn’t. Either way, you can tell MacAlister did her research and really enjoyed working on this book.

As much as I liked all of the characters in this book I would have to say the grumpy feline Moth completely stole the show! I’ve noticed that even if I love the characters in this authors books, I’ll always like the animals more. They have just as much personality as their owners (especially Moth) but they don’t necessarily have to follow the rules of typical animal sidekicks.

Hard Day’s Knight was an interesting short book that I enjoyed and that I learned more about jousting and wenching than I ever could want to know. I wouldn’t mind if there was a sequel to Pepper and Walker’s story but mainly because I’d like to see more of Moth. Now I just need to find a Renaissance festival around here somewhere and get a pair of those devil horns for my kitty too!

If you would like to read an excerpt from Hard Day’s Knight there is one available on MacAlister’s website and if you would like more information on the author and her books, Wikipedia has an article. There is a behind-the-scenes podcast for this book as well. As I mentioned, MacAlister did some research before she wrote this story including joining the International Wenches Guild and talking to people from the Seattle Knights performance troupe.
Other Katie MacAlister Posts by Me:

• Blow Me Down
• Ain't Myth-Behaving