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Lionheart’s Scribe

by Karleen Bradford

Completing her trilogy about the Crusades with this volume, Karleen Bradford once again creates a gripping story that brings a distant time and place vividly alive for young readers today. Reflecting contemporary awareness that the Crusades were hardly heroic, Bradford doesn’t shirk from portraying the mixed motives, bad behaviour, suffering, betrayal, and confusion of the enterprise. By including two young Muslim characters she avoids a narrowly Eurocentric perspective.

Fifteen-year-old Matthew, an apprentice scribe crippled by a clubfoot, finds his life changed when his hometown of Messina, Sicily, becomes in 1190 the meeting place of two great crusading armies headed to reclaim the Holy City of Jerusalem from the Muslim forces of Salah ud-din. Opportunistic and quick-witted, Matthew seizes a chance to travel eastward with the entourage of the English King, Richard the Lionheart. Matthew’s skill with languages and writing soon enable him to serve the King personally during the arduous sea voyage and frustrating campaigns in Palestine.

Matthew is a very different character from the protagonists of the first two novels in this trilogy, but he’s a convincing and engaging boy whose growth to maturity reflects the grimness of the events he witnesses. Presented in the form of Matthew’s journal, the novel is skillful in integrating historical material into his own perspective and personal story. Perhaps partly because King Richard’s crusade lacked any dramatic termination, the novel’s conclusion seems a bit flat, and the secondary characters are not as vivid as in There Will Be Wolves, Bradford’s award-winning first volume of the trilogy. Nonetheless, Lionheart’s Scribe is an absorbing tale about a complex and fascinating period.

 

Reviewer: Gwyneth Evans

Publisher: HarperCollins Canada

DETAILS

Price: $14

Page Count: 176 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-00-648116-7

Released: Aug.

Issue Date: 1999-10

Categories: Children and YA Fiction

Age Range: ages 11–14

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