The Wizard Knight

Gene Wolfe's two part series, begging with "The Knight" and ending with "The Wizard" is brilliant, this is Wolfe at his best as in "The Book of the New Sun".

 Like most Wolfe novels it is told from the first person perspective, with an unreliable narrator who calls himself Sir Able of the High Heart.

 We know that Able is originally from our world, but as a young boy he wanders in the woods and somehow finds himself in another world.  This is a pretty generic starting point, and when I first read it I was afraid Wolfe might have cast his lot in with all the generic fantasy writers of the world.  Thankfully this is not the case.

 Able is writing the story as a letter to his brother Ben, who lives in our world, and whom he has not seen since he left it.

 Able has the body of a man, for he was aged by an aelf named Disire, but he is in many ways still a child, and his recollection of events as he writes are often warped by this.

 Wolfe crafts an amazing world based on Norse mythology, a world with multiple levels, where each levels inhabitants serve as the Gods of the level bellow.

 Wolfe also creates some terrific characters aside from Able, a talking cat named Mani, and a magical dog named Gylf that can transform into a terrifying beast, Gylf can speak but rarely choses to do so.

At first glance, with very simple sounding titles, this may appear to be a children's book.  It is not, Wolfe is a very deep writer, he writes without holding back or coddling the reader.  Still this is one of Wolfe's more accessible works, so it may be a better starting point than "The Book of the New Sun".

10/10