CONFESSIONS OF
A KNIGHT ERRANT
by Gretchen McCullough
Humorous Fiction
Publisher: Cune Press
Page Count: 240 pages
Publication Date: October 18, 2022
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Confessions of a Knight Errant is a comedic, picaresque novel in the tradition of Don Quixote with a flamboyant cast of characters.
Dr. Gary Watson is the picaro, a radical environmentalist and wannabe novelist who has been accused of masterminding a computer hack that wiped out the files of a major publishing company. His Sancho Panza is Kharalombos, a fat, gluttonous Greek dancing teacher, who is wanted by the secret police for cavorting with the daughter of the Big Man of Egypt.
Self-preservation necessitates a hurried journey to the refuge of a girls’ camp in rural Texas. Then a body turns up nearby that is connected to Middle East antiquities, and they are on the run once more.
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Let’s get one thing out of the way: CONFESSIONS OF A KNIGHT ERRANT is written in a style similar to DON QUIXOTE. I’ve never read DON QUIXOTE. (I know. Don’t @ me. So many books; so little time.) Given this, I have no frame of reference for comparison between the two novels. From what I gathered doing minimal research on Wikipedia, the episodic format is a key link between these two novels. I’m going to think of episodic as similar to a tv series. Each chapter\episode is an individual portion of the story, rather than a typical novel which continues from the previous chapter.
Offbeat characters fill CONFESSIONS. Our main character, Gary, is an expert liar, on the lamb from Interpol, and an environmental crusader. On more than one occasion, Gary remarks that he should be an actor and I’d have to agree! He manages to come up with some humorous responses to the most banal questions. And Gary’s regular complaints about chiggers made my legs itch!
Kharalombos, Gary’s sidekick, is a Lothario / dance instructor. He loves all the women. And they love him. This gets Kharalombos into more than one sticky situation!
The women in CONFESSIONS are also memorable. Pint-size pain-in-the-neck campers, a teenage seductress, the mothers of the campers, and more are well-developed and realistic characters.
Humor runs rampant throughout the novel. From Gary’s lies, to giving shots to a diabetic dog, and then chasing down escaped petting zoo animals, I found myself chuckling one more than one occasion.
Personally, I found the episodic format a challenge. I’ve been struggling to sit still and read lately. My mind is prone to wander, and I need an over-arching story or plot to keep my attention. While many of the scenes in CONFESSIONS were hilarious, I didn’t find that drive to turn the pages and find out what happens next. The story is nicely wrapped up by the last chapters and with the epilogue. I was curious how possible spies, the IRA, Libya, and Egypt could mesh together with the rest of the story and a Christian Summer Camp for Girls. But Ms. McCullough does a masterful job of tying the different storylines together.
If humor and original characters call to you, check out CONFESSIONS OF A KNIGHT ERRANT for an adventure from your couch.
Thanks to author Gretchen McCullough and Lone Star Book Blog Tours for providing this opportunity to review CONFESSIONS OF A KNIGHT ERRANT. I received the novel free in exchange for my honest review.
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Gretchen McCullough was raised in Harlingen Texas. After graduating from Brown University in 1984, she taught in Egypt, Turkey, and Japan. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama and was awarded a teaching Fulbright to Syria from 1997-1999.
Her stories, essays and reviews have appeared in The Barcelona Review, Archipelago, National Public Radio, Story South, Guernica, The Common, The Millions, and the LA Review of Books. Translations in English and Arabic have been published in: Nizwa, Banipal, Brooklyn Rail in Translation, World Literature Today, and Washington Square Review with Mohamed Metwalli. Her bilingual book of short stories in English and Arabic, Three Stories From Cairo, translated with Mohamed Metwalli, was published in July 2011 by AFAQ Publishing House, Cairo. A collection of short stories about expatriate life in Cairo, Shahrazad’s Tooth, was also published by AFAQ in 2013.
Currently, she is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric and Composition at the American University in Cairo.
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Thanks for a balanced review. Not every book works for every reader, but I like that you found much to enjoy in this one and can see how it’s a great fit for other readers. (I very much enjoyed Don Quixote!). Appreciate your sharing your thoughts.
Thanks Kristine!