Ten years ago Sir Percival was sent on a quest for the Holy Grail. He returns to England (here called by it’s old name of Albion) to kind that King Arthur is dead and so are all the other Knights of the Round Table, Queen Guenevere is in hiding in a northern abbey, Norse raiders have taken over London and it’s surrounding areas. The woman responsible for this havoc is Morgana who remains in the land in the hopes of finding and killing Merlin the Wise. Then her quest will be fulfilled. I like that this is an Arthurian tale after Arthur. The only other book like that I’ve read is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (which is fantastic). It also turns canon on it’s head quite a bit. In some instances this is great, like Lancelot being a bit of a jerk. In other instances, like no acknowledgment whatsoever that Lancelot is Galahad’s father are strange. Similarly, Percival speaks of his father but never mentions his name. Canonically, Percival’s father is King Pellinore and he has several brothers, all of whom were also Knights of the Table. None of this is addressed in this book, so the reader is left to assume that none of that is true here. Things like this make me feel like I would have enjoyed the book a whole lot more if I didn’t already know Arthur’s story backwards and forwards. The deviations from the norm were so great that they distracted me, rather than intrigued or delighted me. I know that it’s difficult to put a unique spin on a story this old, but I feel that other authors have done it much better. On a positive note, I really liked original character Capussa. He was a gladiator with Percival in Egypt who hails from Numidia (modern-day Tunisia and Algeria in northern Africa). Unlike Percival, Capussa had a sense of humor; he loved a good joke and enjoyed the rapt audiences he always had for his stories. Unfortunatley, his stories were mostly about Percival so we learned very little of Capussa’s life before the two met. While I didn’t hate the book, I won’t be checking out the rest of the series.
Review by Jessica A.
Tess is on her first mission as the ambassador/sister to the new Queen of Constantinople. All she has to do is be a passenger on her ship and keep her sister company and safe on their honeymoon voyage. However, the pirates have other ideas in mind. The ship is captured, her sister is taken, her ship is sank, burned with her on it, she escapes, is bitten by a venomous cat, learns to possess the wind and is nearly killed a dozen times. Will she get her sister and her sister’s new husband back safely, without paying the ransom? Will her affection for her friends and family be her undoing? Read this young adult novel to find out.
I love a new telling of the legend of King Arthur. But, this one was hard for me to get through. Lackey looks back at some of the legends of , in which Arthur has three wives each with the same name. I guess that was my problem with the book, it was not the story which I liked it was the confusion I suffered with all the names that were similar. Our story focuses on the third wife Gwenwyfar and her little sister Gwenhwyfach, but there 
