The Fanged Crown

By Jenna Helland
Wizards of the Coast, $7.99, 320 pages

In strict adventure, fantasy style, Jenna Helland’s debut novel, The Fanged Crown, the first novel in the Forgotten Realms The Wilds series, opens with a scene of non-stop action (a ship-to-ship fight) and never stops. With echoes of the grandmaster of adventure fantasy, Robert E. Howard, Helland prefers to entertain with activity and death-defying fight scenes rather than dive too deeply into characters.

The story, which takes place in two timelines, is about Captain Harp and the crew of the Crane. Hired to go to Chult to find a lost colony, Harp and his crew find much more than they bargained for. The back story was believable and well-integrated into the timeline – The Fanged Crown could easily have been serialized in “Astounding Tales” back in the heyday of adventure fiction. Some characters acted out-of-character and the book needed a better copyeditor since it is full of grammatical mistakes, but it’s still a fund read.

If you’re looking for characterization, this story is not for you, but if swashbuckling style swordplay, strange creatures, and dungeon crawling are plot elements you enjoy reading, than this is a worthwhile book.

Reviewed by:  John Ottinger III