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nina_chan01 's review for:
Perilous Times
by Thomas D. Lee
This one's not really a retelling. It's more of an author playing with classic characters and breathing great new life into them but failing the landing.
It all starts with Kay, once a knight of Arthur's round table, now an immortal who comes back whenever Britain is in peril. He wakes up just in time to save a young woman from soldiers who are trying to kill her after she's set a bomb in a fracking site. There's a huge explosion that wakes up a dragon, and then we're off on an exploration of a doomed Britain on a planet that many see as beyond salvation and full of people who are more concerned with fighting each other than trying to fix it. We also get one of my favorite representations of Lancelot (pitty the book he landed in) to show how the other side of the conflict (ie, the rich people most responsible for the mess) and give Kay some solid competition in the deflated, hopeless knight category.
There is so much potential in the very imaginative plot and the great cast of characters, but Lee squandered it by continually hitting readers with the dire and depressing situation the world is in. I get that it's a bit of a warning and trying to get a strong message out by way of a story, but I continually found myself putting it down because I couldn't keep reading the awful things and hopeless situations. It even made me a bit angry because I really wanted to see where the story headed. Kay, Mariam, and Lancelot are excellent characters whose story I wanted to follow, I just couldn't put up with the way it was being told.
Thanks to NetGalley and Ballantine Books for what had the potential to be a great read!
It all starts with Kay, once a knight of Arthur's round table, now an immortal who comes back whenever Britain is in peril. He wakes up just in time to save a young woman from soldiers who are trying to kill her after she's set a bomb in a fracking site. There's a huge explosion that wakes up a dragon, and then we're off on an exploration of a doomed Britain on a planet that many see as beyond salvation and full of people who are more concerned with fighting each other than trying to fix it. We also get one of my favorite representations of Lancelot (pitty the book he landed in) to show how the other side of the conflict (ie, the rich people most responsible for the mess) and give Kay some solid competition in the deflated, hopeless knight category.
There is so much potential in the very imaginative plot and the great cast of characters, but Lee squandered it by continually hitting readers with the dire and depressing situation the world is in. I get that it's a bit of a warning and trying to get a strong message out by way of a story, but I continually found myself putting it down because I couldn't keep reading the awful things and hopeless situations. It even made me a bit angry because I really wanted to see where the story headed. Kay, Mariam, and Lancelot are excellent characters whose story I wanted to follow, I just couldn't put up with the way it was being told.
Thanks to NetGalley and Ballantine Books for what had the potential to be a great read!