Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City
-
-
4.3 • 151 Ratings
-
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
K. J. Parker's new novel is the remarkable tale of the siege of a walled city, and the even more remarkable man who had to defend it.
A siege is approaching, and the city has little time to prepare. The people have no food and no weapons, and the enemy has sworn to slaughter them all.
To save the city will take a miracle, but what it has is Orhan. A colonel of engineers, Orhan has far more experience with bridge-building than battles, is a cheat and a liar, and has a serious problem with authority. He is, in other words, perfect for the job.
Sixteen Ways To Defend a Walled City is the story of Orhan, son of Siyyah Doctus Felix Praeclarissimus, and his history of the Great Siege, written down so that the deeds and sufferings of great men may never be forgotten.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Parker (Savages), the more sly and bitter pseudonym of comic fantasist Tom Holt, launches a witty adventure series set in a fictional world with features similar to the Roman Empire. The infectiously optimistic Orhan, colonel-in-chief of the Engineers, is away building a bridge when the unnamed capital city comes under siege. After the soldiers are ambushed and killed and the noblemen flee the city, there's no one left to defend it, so Orhan sneaks his team of carpenters into the city to help. As a former slave and a "milkface," he is the wrong color for a leader, occupying the lowest level of society among the blue-skinned elite Robur. Nevertheless, the local citizens, Robur and milkface alike, rally around the fast-thinking, faster-talking, and resourceful Orhan. The enemy at the gate is 100,000 strong, armed with trebuchets, and led by a tactical genius who's been planning the siege for decades. When Orhan realizes he has a connection to the enemy's leader, he begins to question why he's defending the empire that enslaved him and killed millions of his people. Orhan is a comical, exceptionally lucky, unreliable narrator. Readers will appreciate the infusion of humor and fun-loving characters into this vivid and sometimes grim fantasy world.
Customer Reviews
Loved it
Action-packed, funny, and possibly useful in a rather bizarre set of circumstances.
Disappointing and pedestrian
You can hear the pitches: “It’s The Martian meets Dunkirk”, “Trebuchets and snark, we’ll get the whole XKCD audience”, “the unreliable and irreverent first-person narrator SF subgenre meets the Roman Empire”.
But in the end it’s less than all of these. Too many coincidences, too many plot holes, too much “everyone is a blinkered idiot other than the protagonist”, one-dimensional characters, a wholly unsatisfying ending. I will not be looking at the quasi-sequels that are apparently out there.
Abrupt and disappointing ending
This book was a lot of fun until the final several chapters. It feels like the author just ran out of interest and used a disappointing cop out instead of finishing the story.