Just a bit too self-consciously anachronistic for my taste. Only read a few pages before giving up.

What a hoot! A wildly improbable story but an entertaining ride. I loved every character from Gilderoy, the highwayman who subdues his female victims by kissing them, to Clnzh, the Amazonian pygmy who accompanies Frey Bentos, one of the bad guys. Lady Godiva Dacre is not your usual spoiled English heiress. She can hold her own against any foe. And her sidekick, Kylie, albeit blonde is one sharp cookie. I was laughing out loud at spots and luckily it was in my home with only my husband and my dogs to look askance at me.

Don’t read this if you insist on historical verisimilitude although I believe GMF gets all the actual history right. But if you like witty dialogue, swashbuckling adventure and imaginative descriptions, this is the book for you. ( )

It just goes to show that, sometimes, you shouldn't listen to reviews. I know that's a strange thing to say considering I'm writing a review, but it's true. I'd heard scarcely a positive thing said about The Reavers, the final book by George MacDonald Fraser, and whilst it is true that it is not on par with his other stuff – not least those peerless Flashman books – it is still a cracking little read.

It is, no doubt, a strange one and perhaps this is what has thrown most readers. It is, as Fraser himself admits in the foreword, a piece of 'nonsense'. It has only a sketchy plot comprised of riffs on clichés, two-dimensional characters comprised of the same and a scattergun approach to dialogue, mostly in dialect. In other books, these would all be fatal drawbacks, but The Reavers is nonsense, and fun nonsense at that. Perhaps the best description comes from the blurb (perhaps the only time a book cover has ever been honest and accurate about the pages therein), which suggests Fraser must have conceived [it] in some kind of fit". This is the same voice that you could hear in the Flashman Papers and his other works, just a bit more unhinged.

Maybe it's because I was raised on a diet of Monty Python and Carry On films, and consequently more in tune with what Fraser was doing here, but The Reavers is a hell of a lot of fun. It is genuinely funny – few of the negative reviews seem to mention this important point – and with all the great phrases and asides that we've come to know and love from this writer. I've always thought that it is the light-hearted stuff that gives you just as great an insight into a writer's mind as the serious stuff (see: Hemingway, Ernest) and that's true here. Other Fraser books might mix the fun with compelling characters, adventurous plots and meticulous research, but The Reavers omits all this. It leaves only the fun, so we get to see what Fraser finds funny without all the polish. It might not always be slick, but it's interesting.

But if you're one of those readers who need the writer to do all the work for them, then this certainly isn't for you. It requires application – more, I admit, than a "fun romp" should require – but dedicated Fraser fans will find much of merit. (But, please, don't make this your first George MacDonald Fraser book; it'll put you off the rest.) The pace drags more than a mere 230-page story should, and the dialects – usually a strength of this writer – sometimes require another glance in order to decipher them. But the voice of the writer is still there. It requires tolerance and goodwill to hear it, but once you get onside and ignore the naysayers then you'll be rewarded with a quirky and goofy little read. Just embrace the silliness and don't expect any more than that." ( )

Maybe The Reavers (Knopf, 2008) just isn't the best introductory book to George MacDonald Fraser's works. Maybe I just wasn't in the right mood. Or maybe I just really didn't know what to make of this very strange book. In any event, I struggled to finish it, and don't think I'll try to give it another go. It seems to be (from what he says at the beginning) a sort of light entertainment for Fraser in the writing, and that's certainly how it came across to me.

The book is an odd mish-mash; set in the late Elizabethan period on the English/Scottish border, the characters speak in modern dialects and are constantly spouting anachronisms and modern pop culture references, which was just totally off-putting for some reason (on the other hand, I feel like if it had been done with a little more care, it might have been completely hilarious).

Not a book I connected with, aside from the occasional chuckle or eye-roll.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2010/08/book-review-reavers.html ( )

Fraser is best known for his series of Flashman novels. But this one is a silly stand-alone. In fact, the first sentence of his foreward to the book is: "This book is nonsense." Which means that basically, he just wrote it for fun and he's not hewing closely to the facts of the time period he set it in (Elizabethan England, somewhere around 159-, Fraser is willfully vague). The characters frequently spout anachronisms and it's really just all done for laughs. If you're familiar with Fraser's book The Pyrates, it's close to that style. I loved The Pyrates, and this one was diverting enough but not as easy to follow. Fraser renders his characters' dialogue into their various accents (Scottish, Cockney, American Deep South, Spanish, etc.) and that tends to slow the reading speed doon abit. If ya nae ken whut ahm tockin' aboot, yer in fer a bit o' a slog. Oh, also, a passing familiarity with Cockney rhyming slang also helped in a few spots. To wit: china (plate) = mate, butcher's (hook) = look. ( )