Rating: 4.5🌈

Another great story by Megan Derr. While it’s a bit predictable as far as the outline, it’s in the characters and the journey where the magic happens.

Derr starts with creating a sympathetic main character, Rath. A man literally beaten down by his life’s struggles and the daily catastrophes his drunken father manages to make him responsible for. Rath’s enduring power to survive his own father’s debts as well as provide for his mother put us automatically on his side. Then, the more we become acquainted with Rath, the deeper we dive into his empathy for others and his ability to understand the conditions of those around him. Derr has written us a beautifully human reluctant hero of the common folk.

Combined with a delightful romp with a high borne noble of mysterious lineage and a sudden need for money, Derr sets up her hero for a first class adventure.

It’s called the Tournament of Charlet but sense everyone figures it’s rigged it’s nickname is the Tournament of Losers for all the naive people who enter thinking they will win and marry into royalty and wealth.

As I said, it’s the journey Derr sets Rath out on after he enters the Tournament needing the money to settle debts. Nothing goes as planned and we love it and him that way.

The supporting characters are equally strong and one will find his way into his own book.

I throughly enjoyed this. Derr is a must read for me. And I’m happily waiting for the next to be released.

Meanwhile, if you are a fantasy lover and a Derr fan, grab this one up! Highly recommended.

Legacy of Charlet:

✓ Tournament of Losers #1

◦ Quest of Fools #2 – July 21,2023

Buy Link:

Tournament of Losers (Legacy of Charlet)

Description:

All Rath wants is a quiet, peaceful life. Unfortunately, his father brings him too much trouble—and too many debts to pay—for that to ever be possible. When the local crime lord drags Rath out of bed and tells him he has three days to pay his father’s latest debt, Rath doesn’t know what to do. There’s no way to come up with so much money in so little time.Then a friend poses an idea just ridiculous enough to work: enter the Tournament of Losers, where every seventy-five years, peasants compete for the chance to marry into the noble and royal houses. All competitors are given a stipend to live on for the duration of the tournament—funds enough to cover his father’s debt.All he has to do is win the first few rounds, collect his stipend, and then it’s back to trying to live a quiet life…

Rathatayen Jakobson, thirty-three, Robert’s sausage shop.””

— Tournament of Losers (Legacy of Charlet Book 1) by Megan Derr