Summary:
It’s bad enough waking up in a half-destroyed evil wizard’s workshop with no eyebrows, no memories, and no idea how long you have before the Dread Lord Whomever shows up to murder you horribly and then turn your skull into a goblet or something.
It’s a lot worse when you realize that Dread Lord Whomever is… you.
Gav isn’t really sure how he ended up with a castle full of goblins, or why he has a princess locked in a cell. All he can do is play along with his own evil plan in hopes of getting his memories back before he gets himself killed.
But as he realizes that nothing – from the incredibly tasteless cloak adorned with flames to the aforementioned princess – is quite what it seems, Gav must face up to all the things the Dread Lord Gavrax has done. And he’ll have to answer the hardest question of all – who does he want to be?
A high fantasy farce featuring killer moat squid, toxic masculinity, an evil wizard convocation, and a garlic festival. All at once. All in all, Dread Lord Gavrax has had better weeks.
Review:
I started this book a couple of times before actually getting into it, which is no insult to the book–it just wasn’t the right time for me to read it. Now that I have picked it up, I’m incredibly glad that I did. What sounds like a light fantasy novel has much more to it than meets the eye. Yes, there are many moments of levity, but beneath those lies several interesting questions about identity and morality.
The publisher’s advance description of the book describes it as having a take on toxic masculinity. I’m not sure I would describe it in quite that way, although I think I can see where they would do so. Before losing his memory, Gav did things like eat mostly meat because it’s “manly” and would never show weakness because real men don’t do that. The reason I don’t really see this book as being about toxic masculinity is that those actions happened “off screen” before the book starts. What readers are seeing is the man that Gav is after the memory loss.
What I do think this book is about is morality and whether or not you can fundamentally change as a person. Gav may not have his memories of all of his dastardly deeds, but on some level, he still has the capacity to respond as that person. He finds himself getting angry for what he feels is little to no reason. His first reaction to challenges is to think of a violent solution, even though he doesn’t follow through with it. And this happens often enough that Gav begins to question whether or not he’s irredeemably evil, even though he has no desire to do evil deeds anymore. How does a man with no past reconcile himself with that past? Do his past actions define his present self? Should he feel responsible for what he can’t even remember doing?
The captive princess Eliasha gives Gav more food for thought by pointing out uncomfortable facts, like how he’s still benefitting from his “evil self’s” actions. Should he live in a castle and enjoy having goblin servants and submissive townsfolk if those things were gotten through evil means? Or should he try to hang onto them and use his new worldview to try to improve things?
And the story tackles what may be the biggest question of all: why be good? Who are you being good for? And how do you square knowing that you haven’t been good in the past with your desire to be good now, knowing how hard that will be?
There are more chewy moral questions in the novel, but I won’t spoil them all for you. The author isn’t going to hand you some easy answers, but she will get you to thinking. At the same time, she’s going to entertain you with goblins wearing aprons and attempting to make lark’s tongue pie, killer squid populating the moat, and an incipient garlic festival. A book like this is fantasy at its best, and I can’t wait for others to read it so that I can talk to people about it.
