Green Rider

Fantasy novel about elite messenger riders

I have seen this book around for quite some time. It has a really appealing cover, and I picked up a copy some time ago at the Lifeline Book Fair (back when it was still on). It sat on my shelf gathering dust until it was chosen as one of the books for my fantasy book club. Flying horses, I thought. Exactly what I need.

“Green Rider” by Kristen Britain is a fantasy novel about a teenage girl called Karigan who runs away from her prestigious school after an incident with another student. Travelling alone through a forest, she comes across an injured rider with two arrows in his back. When he implores her with his dying breaths to carry his message to the King, she has no choice but to agree. Taking his horse and his gear, she begins the perilous journey through strange and dangerous lands.

Before I even get started, I have to make it quite clear: there are no flying horses in this book. If that’s what you are hoping for, forget it, you won’t find it here. The book started out quite strong, and is a typical Western-style medieval fantasy novel with swordplay, court intrigue, ghosts, feudalism and a couple of different humanoid races. Although it was a little at odds with the pace and tone of the rest of the book, I enjoyed the interlude with the Berry Sisters and their father’s house full of magical artifacts.

However, not long into the book it becomes clear that this is quite a rambling story that moves from one disaster to the next. As a character, Karigan does not have much agency and her problems are solved again and again not by her own skills, knowledge, instinct or talents, but by the dei ex machina of a myriad of external forces who always seem to arrive in the nick of time. Not that Karigan comes away unscathed; the number of head injuries she sustains in the book left me wondering whether she had developed an acquired brain injury. Distance is a little bit confusing, and this is one occasion where I felt the book really needed a map – for the author as much as for the reader. Despite riding what appears to be the fastest horse imaginable, Karigan always appears to arrive places later than other characters, and the route she takes seems to be no safer or faster than any other route. Furthermore, for all the time Karigan spends riding her horse (which she names, unimaginatively, “The Horse”), I would have expected Britain to spend a little more time on horsemanship. Apart from being given food occasionally, Karigan spends almost no time caring for the horse.

Now, speaking of horses, I cannot understate how disappointed I was that there were no flying horses. Britain hints at them when a character says “[d]o you know there is a legend that…the messenger horses of the Sacor Clans could fly”, and the badges Green Riders wear depict winged horses. Apart from that, flying horses appear to be simply a metaphor, and let me tell you: when I am reading a fantasy novel, I don’t want flying horses to be a metaphor. In fact, there isn’t a great deal of magic and the magic that is there is not clearly explained. Some characters have talents, but why that is or how that  manifests outside obtaining a particular item is never explained. Throughout the book, despite acquiring a Green Rider’s horse, clothing, gear and, for all intents and purposes, profession, Karigan is constantly proclaiming that under no circumstances will she ever be a Green Rider. The lady doth protest too much, methinks. A merchant’s daughter and the equivalent of a high school dropout, it isn’t really ever explained why she is so reluctant to become a Green Rider and other characters maddeningly spend all their time offering her more Green Rider paraphernalia, nodding, smiling and alluding with all the subtlety of a brick to the calling of hoofbeats.

A slow read that doesn’t bring much to the genre that hasn’t already been done, let alone been done better.