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catherine_t 's review for:
Gwenhwyfar: The White Spirit
by Mercedes Lackey
You know the story: Guinevere, Arthur, Lancelot. Except... maybe not. In Mercedes Lackey's take on the Guinevere story, she gives readers a different sort of Guinevere: a Gwenhwyfar.
Gwenhwyfar is the third daughter of King Lleudd and Queen Eleri of Pwyll. Her mother is skilled in the magics of the Old Ways, trained by the Ladies of the Cauldron Well. Gwenhwyfar is Powerful too, but her Power lies in a different direction. Unlike her eldest sister Cataruna, who goes to the Ladies herself to be trained, Gwenhwyfar wishes to follow the Path of the Warrior. This she does, and she is happy. But then she meets Lancelin, one of the High King's Companions, and she wishes that he would see the woman in the warrior.
But of course Gwenhwyfar must meet her destiny in Arthur. And you know this story...
Lackey takes the unusual path of following the Triads of Great Britain, the Welsh poems, in which Arthur is given three queens named Gwenhwyfar. I was intrigued by this, since I have some familiarity with the Triads. The Gwenhwyfar whose tale the reader follows is the final queen, a great deal younger than Arthur, who has become a person in her own right: a warrior, the strong right hand of her father King Lleudd, protector of her sisters and their children. When she is, in the last third of the book, wed to Arthur, it is a pact between kings, not a love-match.
All the usual characters are here, though perhaps not by the names we generally know them. Lackey took the unusual step of keeping the names as close to the original British Celtic as possible, likely lifting them from the Welsh Triads. Mind you, the Knights of the Round Table are painted in broad strokes, not in any depth. Even Arthur is barely there, heard of more than seen. And that's as it should be, since Gwenhwyfar, as the point-of-view character, hardly sees him. She and her sisters and family are much more fleshed out. Gwen herself comes across as a strong, intelligent person.
Which is why I found it hard to swallow the last third of the book, in which she is taken captive by Medraut, Arthur's bastard son got on his half-sister Anna Morgause. The fact that she accepts the drugged drink from Medraut simply rang utterly false for me. I couldn't believe that, even in a fit of anger, Gwen would accept anything from a man she didn't trust, let alone food or drink. If you'd asked me before I read that to rate the book, I'd have given it four stars. But forcing a character to do something for the sake of the plot dropped my review by a star. It's still a good read, and a different perspective on the Arthur/Guinevere story. It's just not as good as it should have been.
Gwenhwyfar is the third daughter of King Lleudd and Queen Eleri of Pwyll. Her mother is skilled in the magics of the Old Ways, trained by the Ladies of the Cauldron Well. Gwenhwyfar is Powerful too, but her Power lies in a different direction. Unlike her eldest sister Cataruna, who goes to the Ladies herself to be trained, Gwenhwyfar wishes to follow the Path of the Warrior. This she does, and she is happy. But then she meets Lancelin, one of the High King's Companions, and she wishes that he would see the woman in the warrior.
But of course Gwenhwyfar must meet her destiny in Arthur. And you know this story...
Lackey takes the unusual path of following the Triads of Great Britain, the Welsh poems, in which Arthur is given three queens named Gwenhwyfar. I was intrigued by this, since I have some familiarity with the Triads. The Gwenhwyfar whose tale the reader follows is the final queen, a great deal younger than Arthur, who has become a person in her own right: a warrior, the strong right hand of her father King Lleudd, protector of her sisters and their children. When she is, in the last third of the book, wed to Arthur, it is a pact between kings, not a love-match.
All the usual characters are here, though perhaps not by the names we generally know them. Lackey took the unusual step of keeping the names as close to the original British Celtic as possible, likely lifting them from the Welsh Triads. Mind you, the Knights of the Round Table are painted in broad strokes, not in any depth. Even Arthur is barely there, heard of more than seen. And that's as it should be, since Gwenhwyfar, as the point-of-view character, hardly sees him. She and her sisters and family are much more fleshed out. Gwen herself comes across as a strong, intelligent person.
Which is why I found it hard to swallow the last third of the book, in which she is taken captive by Medraut, Arthur's bastard son got on his half-sister Anna Morgause. The fact that she accepts the drugged drink from Medraut simply rang utterly false for me. I couldn't believe that, even in a fit of anger, Gwen would accept anything from a man she didn't trust, let alone food or drink. If you'd asked me before I read that to rate the book, I'd have given it four stars. But forcing a character to do something for the sake of the plot dropped my review by a star. It's still a good read, and a different perspective on the Arthur/Guinevere story. It's just not as good as it should have been.