The Mooncalfe

Note: this review was originally written in a notebook on Dec 10/19 while I was on vacation last week.  I've made some minor edits to it while transcribing it.

After finishing End Times in Dragon City,  I wasn't really sure what to read next.  But as I browsed through the 13 pages of things I have on my Kindle, I came across a David Farland story called "The Mooncalfe" and decided to go with that.

"The Mooncalfe" is a tale of King Arthur (or more accurately, Merlin).  A fey girl is conceived by the horned moon.  Her mother. who is ashamed of having been seduced, raises her daughter in secret, always warning her of what men will do when they see her (aka ravish her, particularly because she is beautiful)  After her mother dies, the girl seeks out a favour from the Lady, wanting to be made fully human.  Finding the Lady's fount, she encounters her father, Merlin, who seduced her mother because the portents seemed fair.  Upon discovering this, the daughter curses him, leaving him alone in his misery.

"The Mooncalfe" is a very well written little story.  I read it in no time and loved every minute. :)

Sword of the Rightful King

I was pretty excited to read Jane Yolen's Sword of the Rightful King. The synopsis sells the book as a sort of alternate history of the King Arthur Legend: the mage, Merlinnus, creates the sword in the stone as a test for Arthur, who is already High King of Britain.  But someone else pulls the sword from the stone!!! While that is, in the end, what does happen, this book is very much NOT an alternative history of the story. 

What happens is that Gawaine is summoned to his mother's (Morgause) chambers.  She tries to persuade him to stay home and rule as king of the north, but he refuses; he wants to return to Arthur and Cadbury (Camelot).  So she sends some of his brothers with him (just not the youngest).

I'm going to note here that Gawaine seemed like the main character.  But after this beginning stuff, the narrative largely moved away from him, which was rather disappointing.

Meanwhile, a boy named Gawen also shows up at Arthur's court.  Gawen wants to be trained as a knight, but ends up being told to study with Merlinnus.  It's around here that Merlinnus also has the idea to create the Sword in the Stone as a test for Arthur and a means to unite all of Britain under his rule.  The narrative largely switches to follow Gawen from here rather than Gawaine (and it's a bit confusing because their names are so very similar).

Morgause finds out about this test and conspires to get one of her sons to pull it instead. She shows up at Cadbury to try to work some magic on it; that fails, thanks to Merlinnus and Gawen working on a protection spell.  Then she bespells almost the entire court, and attempts to make Arthur fall in love with her.  Thankfully for all, her scheme is discovered by Gawen, and she leaves.

Then at Midsummer's Eve, when magic is supposed to be most potent, everyone attempts to pull the sword from the stone.  Arthur is the one who succeeds, so everyone is happy.  But he confronts Merlinnus later to tell him that it is a different sword he pulled from the stone. It turns out that Gawen managed to pull it out by melting butter and getting the sword to slide out (this was disappointingly not shown to us, the reader - all we knew was that Gawen went to the kitchen and *did something*); Gawen replaced the sword with another one for some reason.  Arthur claims Gawen is now king, but Gawen reveals that she is in fact a woman and so cannot be king.  Arthur then decides to marry her, making them both High King and Queen of Britain (and uniting the two people who have pulled swords from the stone).

For the most part, this was a fine retelling of the King Arthur myth.  But by leaving out till the very end the fact that someone else did pull the sword from the stone, I felt cheated by the story thanks to the synopsis making me think someone else pulling the sword was the actual main plot point that would get the story going.  The whole sword in the stone took way too long to get going in the book as well, making me sort of lose interest halfway through.  Same with the way the book started with Gawaine and then abandoned his narrative - that actually made me feel cheated as well.

On the plus side though, Yolen has a fine writing style that was easy to read.  I think if the synopsis had been better (and not sort of misleading), I would have been a lot happier reading this book.

Gwenhwyfar: the White Spirit

It's been a long while since I have read a Mercedes Lackey book (in fact it's been even longer than I thought- the last one I read was The Snow Queen, back in 2008 when I started this blog). I've been hoarding The Sleeping Beauty, which is the fifth book in her Five Hundred Kingdoms series (side note: I just found out the sixth book is coming this fall! I'm excited!) But my copy of The Sleeping Beauty is hard covered, so I didn't want to bring it out to camp. But then I discovered that Gwenhwyfar was also on the List. And so, since my copy is soft-covered, Gwenhwyfar accompanied me out to camp.

Gwenhwyfar tells the story of Arthur's third queen (by a twist of fate, all three have the same name). Gwenhwyfar is the third of four daughters to King Lleudd Ogrfan Gawr. As a child she has Power, and assumes she will follow in her mother's footsteps by joining the Ladies of the Cauldron. But there is another fate in store for her. For Gwen is also blessed by Epona, the horse goddess. On the advice of her hero, a female chariot driver named Braith, Gwen finds herself training to be a warrior. She falls into this life with a passion, determined to become one of her father's war chiefs.

But it is only after she has achieved all that she dreamt of that fate conspires to make her Arthur's third wife. As the daughter of a king, she always knew that such could be her fate, and so she bows to it. But how can a warrior turn her back on the life she loves?

It took me a bit to really get into Gwenhwyfar. But once I did, it was well worth the read. Gwen is a wonderful character who I really found myself empathizing with, especially when she was required to become more womanly as the High Queen. While I am not a warrior, I understood what she felt when she was confined within the palace. Someone like her will never be happy, no matter how comfortable and pretty the cage is. She needs to be free.

Something that Arthur says near the end beautifully summed this up: "I tried to make you - what you were not. I took a warhorse, and tried to fit it to a plow" (397). Gwen tries - and fails - to be what she is not in order to please everyone else. And in the end this fails because she is not meant for ploughing.

Gwenhwyfar was a beautiful book, especially for anyone who has ever struggled with trying to be something they are not.