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elenajohansen's review
3.0
The premise is interesting: King Arthur, his knights, and a few other important people in his circle get stuck in a cycle of reincarnation to battle evil magical threats. It's weird, it's over the top, it's Camelot fan fiction, and I want to love it unreservedly.
However, I do have some reservations.
It's short and underdeveloped. I'm not complaining about the cliffhanger, but even for a first book in a series, I feel like we don't get all that many answers to any of the thousand questions the narrative offers. I also feel that using such notable literary figures has led to a sort of assumed shorthand for their characters--no one is developed in any sort of depth, and in fact, I can't recall several named characters ever getting any physical description at all. The ones who do are mostly limited to hair color, which doesn't help when most of the men (Arthur being the notable blond exception) are dark-haired. I mean, can I get even a body type? Who's tall? Who's lean? Is anyone pudgy? Or are they all interchangeable dark, brooding muscle-heads?
My other major issue is that no one (except Galahad) has even the tiniest level of chill. This entire story is set at 11 and it's a bit exhausting, especially when the three POV characters are all hot messes. Anna is deeply troubled, fine. Lancelot is a conflicted man trying to choose between love and duty--absolutely on point with the lore. Merlin, however, is dangerously unstable, it takes almost nothing to provoke him into losing control of his magic, and that's less than fine with me--he's the hero of the romance story line, and even in his past lives he's shown to ride a hair trigger between keeping himself in check and casually obliterating people. Should that be romanticized?
However, I do have some reservations.
It's short and underdeveloped. I'm not complaining about the cliffhanger, but even for a first book in a series, I feel like we don't get all that many answers to any of the thousand questions the narrative offers. I also feel that using such notable literary figures has led to a sort of assumed shorthand for their characters--no one is developed in any sort of depth, and in fact, I can't recall several named characters ever getting any physical description at all. The ones who do are mostly limited to hair color, which doesn't help when most of the men (Arthur being the notable blond exception) are dark-haired. I mean, can I get even a body type? Who's tall? Who's lean? Is anyone pudgy? Or are they all interchangeable dark, brooding muscle-heads?
My other major issue is that no one (except Galahad) has even the tiniest level of chill. This entire story is set at 11 and it's a bit exhausting, especially when the three POV characters are all hot messes. Anna is deeply troubled, fine. Lancelot is a conflicted man trying to choose between love and duty--absolutely on point with the lore. Merlin, however, is dangerously unstable, it takes almost nothing to provoke him into losing control of his magic, and that's less than fine with me--he's the hero of the romance story line, and even in his past lives he's shown to ride a hair trigger between keeping himself in check and casually obliterating people. Should that be romanticized?
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