Review: The Last Shield by Cameron Johnston
Blurb:
A gender-flipped Die Hard set in a mysterious castle, Cameron Johnston's The Last Shield is an engaging fantasy read, perfect for fans of John Gwynne and Mark Lawrence.
The ancient forest realm of Sunweald is bordered on two sides by far mightier nations – a precarious situation. At its centre, the Sunweald Palace is home to the Lord Regent and the heir to the throne, together with numerous precious and powerful artefacts. The Palace is protected by the realm's elite Shields, dedicated to guarding the royal line against all foes.
A group of vicious brigands called the Wildwood Reivers have been stealing arcane artefacts and smuggling them across the borders, out of Sunweald. And the objects they most desire are stored in the mystical Wyrm Vault, hidden away deep in the bones of the earth, within the walls of the Palace itself.
As political and religious tensions mount, Sunweald's druids prepare to enact rituals for the Summer Solstice – but the Wildwood Reivers and their treacherous allies have other plans. It falls to Briar, the commander of the Shields, to defend the ancient corridors and secret tunnels of the Palace. The odds may be against her, but she'll see every enemy head adorning a spike or she'll die trying…
Review:
Die Hard is one of my favorite movies of all time, and one of the easiest ways to get me to jump on board with a book is to say, “It’s like Die Hard.” Lo and behold, that is just what Cameron Johnston has done here with The Last Shield. With a gender-bent take on the best Christmas movie ever, The Last Shield is a blast of a tale with electric action, a well-rounded hero, and real and palpable stakes.
The forest realm of Sunweald is home to numerous ancient and powerful artifacts, and its palace is protected by the realm’s most elite defenders, the Shields who stand against those who would seek harm upon the realm, or its Lord Regent. The brigands known as the Wildwood Reivers have smuggled such artifacts out of Sunweald for years, but the greatest prize of all rests the vaults of Sunweald’s palace. When plans have been set in motion to break into the vault, it falls to Briar, the commander of the Shields to stop them. Long since crippled by a poisoned arrow to the leg, it’s her against 31 brigands, traitors, and sorcerers. The odds have never been stronger in her favor.
Any John McClane type needs to be an embodiment of badassery, and Johnston absolutely nails that with Briar. The commander of the Shields is a hero, a paragon to the order of Shields, but after her near-fatal injury, she no longer feels capable to carry this sacred duty that she has dedicated her life toward. She’s strong, she’s respected, but she’s also stubborn, and that combination of qualities helps make her so compelling once the action begins in earnest. It’s her craftiness and ability to adapt to an unfavorable scenario that makes her defense of the palace so compelling, that if the defense was performed when she was at her fighting peak, the story would have suffered for it. The Die Hard formula is a simple one, but it also allows the focus to be more on the survival of the hero than the spectacle of the action, and that’s what really works here.
The dynamic between Briar and her two charges—the Lord Regent Alaric and the royal heir Kester—helps lift the story’s stakes even higher. Breaching the vault would involve putting the two royals’ lives in danger, and the lengths Briar will go to protect them both is enough to get the blood pumping. From her stern tutelage of the cowardly Kester to her fervent devotion and love for Alaric, it helps to ground Briar as a complex character against the backdrop of a violent world. She’s not a character who instantly knows the right thing to do. She has questions and doubts, and the stakes at play do not always allow her to think clearly on what to do.
The setting and pacing help to allow these things to take root so they can properly grow over the course of The Last Shield. It does take a while to get to the meat of the action—my estimate is about 30 to 40 percent of the way through an under-400 page book—but it allows us to see Briar at her peak, establish her connection to Alaric and Kester, and watch their own arcs progress in tandem to her own. It does give the impression of a false start, but that false start is a necessary one to show the contrast of the action proper and how our three leads respond to it all.
If there’s an issue I could raise, it’s primarily with the villains. I found them to be a bit one-dimensional, the two primary antagonists having singular goals in mind. They came across more as central faces to a larger tapestry of villains, and they suffered a bit for it. Hans Gruber, these guys are not. The antagonist as a whole feels more like the insurmountable odds, the near-three dozen enemies standing in Briar’s path, that even though most of them have names and some have existing connections to Briar, they all could have just been faceless to me and nothing would have changed. Throw in a climax that feels a bit rushed and a little too nicely-knit, and The Last Shield is quite a perfect book, even if it’s still a really good one.
At the end of the day, The Last Shield is a fun book. It’s effectively “Die Hard in a druidic castle,” so if you’re a fan of that formula, you’re gonna find a lot to enjoy here.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go send a letter to the writers of Bob’s Burgers to have them do an episode for “The Last Shield: The Musical.”
