Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz

3.5 stars, Metaphorosis Reviews

Summary
Sir Hereward, born to an insular community of witches, and Mister Fitz, a sorcerous wooden puppet, are sworn to eradicate malevolent godlets. A collection of stories of their adventures.

Review
I've had mixed success with Garth Nix. I loved what I read of his Old Kingdom series and one or two other books borrowed from friends. I was less taken with his Left Handed Booksellers ofLondon novel. And I've read three Hereward and Fitz stories before in an earlier collection and .. shrugged. I found them to be well written but very reminiscent of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. In his introduction to this collection, Nix acknowledges that inspiration, along with others.

Those three earlier stories form the first three in this collection as well, along with half a dozen more. The tripling of content hasn't really changed my mind – these stories are all of a piece, and probably best read separately, with some separation.

They're all well written, fun, and interesting. Nix does a good job of presenting all the context needed to read them as standalone pieces, without making it boring for those reading the collection all at once, and that's a harder job than it sounds. As I noted previously, Nix is also probably a better writer than Leiber, and it's nice to see a writer use the occasional odd word correctly (and with the feeling that he actually knows it rather than resorting to a thesaurus), though his usage stumbles a bit in one of the later stories. The stories are well put together for what they are. However, they simply aren't much – they're light, pleasant fantasy fare, but not that memorable. That was a problem for some of Leiber's stories as well, but he often managed to work in a little pathos to give the thing a little more body. I'd have liked to see some of that here.

If you're a fan of Nix, or haven't read Leiber, or just want some easy reading, I recommend this. If you know Leiber well, you could see these as an homage and continuation, but you may also feel it's very familiar ground.

I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review.