Oh my gosh, I raced through this book.  It's not super fast-paced but I just couldn't put it down.  Keetch paints such rich and vivid pictures of landscapes and characters.  I fell in love with the main characters, finding their way through a hostile, patriarchal world, instantly.  

I'm quite an Arthurian novice but still greatly enjoyed this retelling.

I haven’t read the original text(s) here, so I can’t comment on the accuracy or skilfulness of the book as a retelling. 

As a story however, this was fun. I would possibly lean more towards 3.5 stars in terms of skill, but it was exactly what I was in the mood for and the vibes were just great, so an extra 0.25 for enjoyment.

This book is fluidly written. Morgan is relatable and vividly described, I especially loved her as a healer. I‘ll be interested to see how her journey towards darkness is pulled off. I was also very lucky to read this by the sea, and that was perfect - stormborn Morgan and Tintagel brought to life even better. 

Overall a solid debut and I‘m looking forward to the next one. 

Covering about fifteen years, following Morgan from childhood to womanhood, her growth and the injustices she endures, this novel truly felt like a journey and a half.

As I was reading, the pages flew by and I felt very immersed in the story. But as I put the book down I didn’t really find myself reaching for it again, so it took me surprisingly long to get through it. Don’t get me wrong, disrupting and unexpected things happen that made me want to continue, but the pacing didn’t change very much: Something happened, then something else, and something else… and it’s not entirely clear where things were heading, so we’re mainly going along for the ride. That’s all right and well, but but maybe I would have hoped for a bit more intensity and higher stakes, all the while it was still interesting and well narrated.

The first couple of chapters gripped me off the bat, then I found myself a bit bored with the slightly dragged out (quite cliché but still well written) romance, before things stepped up a bit in intrigue and pace towards the last third of the book.

I would have liked to see certain people suffer a bit more at the hands of Morgan, but it was truly refreshing and empowering to see her grow into her own power. I enjoyed her as a fleshed out protagonist and the people she chose to place her trust in. I found the empowerment of women to be masterfully woven into this setting of formal courts and malign kings without making it into something overly feminist and unbelievable for the time period in which the story takes place.

Looking forward to reading the follow-up!

★★★★+

This is a debut and it reads as such: there are rough patches and the book falls too much on telling instead of showing. As such, a lot of elements fall flat for me, as they don’t seem to be organic developments, but more so “because that’s what the script says.” 

A lot of the romances in this book were very insta-love, but a lot of page time was devoted to them. Since the romances didn’t really change, it made for a bit of a boring read. 

Speaking of things that didn’t change, most of the characters were rather flat and one-dimensional. Our protagonist, Morgan, doesn’t really have a character arc. To be honest, a lot of her character felt very modern—which contrasted with everyone else acting more “medieval.”

At one point, she says something about not wanting to be sold to the highest bidder, which just felt out of place with the setting.

 

I’m a big fan of the Arthurian mythos, and as such, tend to read anything that comes out in relation to it. This retelling didn’t really offer a fresh take on the mythos. If you have read The Mists of Avalon (ignoring MZB, if you can, for a second), this reads like a flat rendition of that book. The most unique element of this book, in comparison to other retellings, was

the convent element. I liked the way her time in the convent was portrayed: a place of learning and refuge, a mix of scholarship and religion. It reminded me a bit of The Book of Gothel in that sense.

The other element that I really enjoyed was

how Arthur and all of those going-ons were shoved off to the side. Guinevere isn’t named in this book; it’s just presented as “Arthur suddenly got married for love.” This also goes for Mordred—we can see how both Arthur and Morgause know about this, and her child is described as blonde, but there is nothing that Morgan knows about the situation.

If you are looking for something you can breeze through in a couple hours, maybe pick this up, but if you are looking for something fresh, I’d skip this one.