Knight or Knave

Knight or Knave by Andre Norton and Sasha Miller
Tor Fantasy - June 2, 2001
320 pages

Times are changing in Rendel. The old King is dead, and the foolish Prince Florian has assumed the throne. Florian's mother, Queen Ysa of the House of Yew, still controls the land from behind the scenes, but her job grows more difficult every day. Her unworthy, headstrong son is harder to control than her husband was, and she must spend more time than ever masking her own movements. Her husband's illegitimate daughter Ashen, heir to the nearly dead House of Ash, still causes trouble by her very existence, and must never be given an opening to the throne. The barbarian Sea-Rover clan presents problems from the edge of the Bog, Ysa's newest magical ally has been exposed as a traitor, and nothing is going as Ysa had planned.
And the still unknown yet encroaching threat from the North continues to grow.
Through births and deaths, marriages and duels, love and betrayal, magic and force, the four houses of Rendel can only survive by the strength of their unity--but is unity possible in such a court of intrigue as this one?

When I was in middle school, we had this thing called the "class story". Every person in the class wrote the next chapter of it. You got some people who knew how to write and would make everything smoothly connect while adding their own personal style and throwing in a twist. Then there were the people who made Jackie Chan come in and nuke everyone except a rabid squirrel. (I'm serious, that was seventh grade.) Knight or Knave was kind of like that on a smaller scale.

You get parts that help move the story forward and you get parts that bring it to a screeching halt. You get parts with characters that have good attributes, flaws, motivation, and ideas, and you get parts with characters that are completely black-and-white. All of the black-and-white characters, though, are shallow. You get parts that are great and you get parts that are...not great.

Now, after dedicated research on both of the authors, I'm going to choose to believe that the better parts were written by Andre Norton and the worse parts were written by Sasha Miller. That being said, I may possibly be continuing the series out of interest, which is what happened with Knight or Knave after To The King a Daughter, but I certainly won't be devouring it any time soon.

Grade: B-/C+ (I'm in the middle on this one)