Book Review: Her Knight at the Museum
Remember how delightful Chris Hemsworth was as Thor in the first movie specifically? An earnest man out of time overtaken with the wonder of everything around him, driven by a fierce love of family, but also a contagious zest for life? Now imagine if that version of Thor was a romance novel hero, and you’ve got Griffin in Bryn Donovan’s Her Knight at the Museum.
The story follows Emily, a conservationist at the Art Institute of Chicago tasked with working on a statue of a medieval knight, only to realize said statue is in fact a real man, who was cursed and turned into a statue as a result, able only to venture out of his stone prison by visiting people in their dreams — lucky for him and for me, because contemplating the existential horror of being sentient for centuries while unable to speak to anyone else would freak me out more than I care to admit. When Emily manages to bring him to life, she must both acclimate the 1400s knight to the 2020s, while also keeping the authorities off her trail, as she is a person of interest in the statue’s “theft”.
The magic and mystery of the story are delightful of course, but the real highlight is the fish out of water comedy, as Emily realizes just how much of modern life needs to be tailored for Griffin to understand it, and Griffin’s out-of-pocket reactions to most things were laugh out loud funny. Donovan has a real gift for earnestly comedic dialogue and I would happily read another novel of hers!
Her Knight at the Museum is out on November 12, 2024. Special thank you to Berkley for the advance copy for review purposes.
