When legends walk among people – a review of the book “Grombelard legend. Heart of the Mountains”

 Stories

In the Grombelard legend. Heart of the Mountains, we find several related stories. Or is it one story from which a few fragments have simply been cut out? We meet the main character, Karenira, shortly after she arrived at Grombelard. In fact, she doesn’t know anything about it yet, which puts herself at risk. Then the action skips further in time. The protagonist is already more experienced and quite famous. However, even after this passage, the narrative moves forward. The individual parts of the story are interconnected – both with the character of Karenira and other heroes, and finally with the events that took place. However, this is not a story that leads us from A to Z. Instead, we can look at how the protagonist has been doing over the years and how she has changed.

Such a fragmentation of the plot may seem uninteresting to some. However, there is nothing to be afraid of. The author is very skilled at using words and this structure of the piece does not bother him at all. The heroes we meet are flesh and blood – they have their advantages and disadvantages. It is easy for us to like them, but they can also alienate each other. There are moments when they disappoint us – just as only a loved one who has betrayed the trust placed in him can disappoint. The end has created these characters with great skill and some of them, even those remaining in the fourth plan, can be remembered perfectly well.

Although the whole thing is written really well, a few elements could be removed from it. I emphasize – it’s not that something is uninteresting. The novel is read with bated breath from beginning to end. However, after reading it, you will notice that some threads do not contribute much to the main plot, and while they are interesting, they are nevertheless unnecessary. One of the parts, although important, could be significantly shortened and presented as reminiscences in various places in the book.

Legends

Grombelard is an inhospitable land. Constant rain, wind, hostile mountains, and robbers. However, this is where the legends can be found. Perhaps people, to cope with a hard life, have to create it, and perhaps there is something in this part of the empire that attracts unique people and events here. It is important, however, that the legends are not only repeated in the evenings by the fire, but can also be found on the trail.

Feliks W. Kres showed in an interesting way how various events can create a legend. Several characters that we meet in the pages of the book can be described as such. For some, we don’t know their full story, but we learn enough about one of them to understand why people are talking about it. Both the idea itself and its implementation deserve recognition.

Book of the Whole

Grombelard legend. Heart of the Mountains is the third volume of the Book of the Whole , but it is a story separate from both the Northern Frontier and the King of the Bezmiarów . It is true that the novel features some people known from the previous installments of the series, but we will not find a continuation of the plot here. However, these individual people or motives that we notice may be a signal that everything will be intertwined in the further part, creating a specific whole – we will see if it will happen.