Swashbuckling! This book's characters serve as a definition for the word!
I enjoyed reading about the adventures of M. d'Artagnan and his three friends. At the start of the book d'Artagnan can barely travel down the road without engaging strangers in duels over some perceived slight, and indeed this is how he first meets the musketeers. Together they perform all sorts of ridiculous feats: foiling the cardinal's machinations, defeating large numbers of enemy soldiers while breakfasting at the siege of La Rochelle, and avoiding assassination attempts by the evil Lady de Winter.
Highly entertaining, although I did wonder what readers would have thought of it when it was published in 1844? Would it have been the equivalent of an modern action novel, something like a Tom Clancy book?
I was also incredibly confused by the currency in the book: pistoles, livres, crowns, francs etc. This is common enough that it deserves its own Wikipedia page :)
4 stars.
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