I really wanted to love this book! I've read TH White's OaFK and have memorized the movie Merlin (the older one with Sam Neil & Helena Bonam-Carter) so I love the legend of Arthur.
The first 50% of the book was painfully boring. This is a book about knights and magic and inexplicably there was no action!
So "Guinevere" is sent by Merlin to protect King Arthur from a magical attack. She arrives to Camelot in the guise of being his wife. But she doesn't know anything about the threat, she is ill-prepared for life as a queen, and her magic skills are minimal, limited to "knot magic".
The first half of the book can be summarized: "Guinevere sneaks through Camelot, tying knots, bumbling around, jumping to conclusions, complaining about the boring duties of a queen, pining for Arthur, and worrying about her limited magic abilities." That's it. Seriously.
The second half finally picks up with some action and some (predictable) revelations. Even so, a lot is left unanswered, in preparation for the following books in the series.
I feel this book is geared toward a younger audience, as the concepts are pretty simplistic, man vs magic, good vs evil. The insta-love and weak love triangle are my least fave tropes, so I found them annoying. The characters lacked any real depth, so I did not connect to them. There was really no tension in the story, and no strong compulsion to find out what happened next.
Overall, I almost DNF'd this because of the first half of the book, but the second half hints that it might be worth trying the second book.
Thanks to NetGalley, HarperCollins, and DeLaCorte Press for a free ARC in exchange for my honest review.
No comments:
Post a Comment