Queen of None

Great book

This was a strange read. I liked that it was old from the POV of Anna, an Arthurian character rarely explored, but Anna literally is just telling a story. That means we get an awful lot of telling and not much doing. Oddly, we only get to 'interact' with a few characters in this novel, and we are 'told' about the others without being given the chance to make the decision on who the characters are for ourselves. The relationships are mixed up in this tale which I liked - Anna is married off to the Lancelot character, and Guinevere's character is split into three sisters, which sets the stage for some interesting content that was never fully actualised. My main problem with this book was that I felt as if I was constantly reading contradictions - I can't specify here without spoiling, but in the first half of the book certain facts were presented to be one way, and by the end of the book they were presented to be the opposite, which detracted from the overall reading experience. Also, Anna was not an adequate narrator - any major event or character development was told after the fact, as if it was separate from the overall tale. On paper this book is exactly the kind of Arthurian tale I like to read. But it missed the mark for me. The beginning was not clearly written, and I felt the main drive of Anna's (her revenge against Merlin) was not adequately explained; the book relied too much on the reader knowing why Merlin should be seen as a 'baddie' from the point of view of the women in the tale, without explaining why itself. If I hadn't bought all three books in this series I probably wouldn't have persisted with the final 10% of this novel, but I did. Plenty of other people seem to love it, but unfortunately it just wasn't for me.

WHY HAVEN'T YOU READ THIS YET???

Another excellent book from Natania Barron! Highly recommend!

This is a book to be sipped and savored, to be sure - from the turns of phrase to the turns of fortune. However it is no Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave formulaic romance. One must look to all the spaces between - between characters, between times, between destinies - to gaze in wonder at how love and hope may eke out an existence in the liminal. These opportunities are very often lost in other tellings and retellings that use (or perhaps misuse) either high fantasy tropes or a surfeit of action scenes. This is a glorious challenge to those who think they know what is going to happen next. Thank you, Natania Barron, for this masterwork. It was a gift I will not forget.