Quote:
Originally Posted by edbro
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I thought the April Fool's joke was that bzKindle was claiming to read it at all.
As for me, le book du bus ride was
Anne Eliot Crompton's
Merlin's Harp, a promotional freebie from last year which I started upon yesterday to decide whether to spend 66 cents on
Percival's Angels, another book in the same series which is currently on sale for $1.59 at Kobo and discountable with coupon.
The answer turned out to be "sure, why not?"
This was an Arthurian re-imagining in roughly the same vein as
Marion Zimmer Bradley's
The Mists of Avalon, but even more tilted towards the traditional/mystical/pagan in contrast to the newfangled/mundane/Christian elements of the tales, though not nearly as comprehensive of the legends, much less lengthy. Nimue, "Viviane", Merlin et al. are now outright Fey in whole or part (though rather than being elfish-type otherworldly Faerie, the Fey are more like displaced Pictish natives with minor magical abilities).
The story is entirely told through Niviane's eyes and really skims over much of the traditional plots in favour of recounting how Fey-Human interrelations and the Goddess influenced her and Merlin's part in the classical Lancelot/Guinevere/Arthur/Morgan/Mordred tale of love and betrayal, which is kind of mostly backdrop for her internal musings about it all.
But it was interesting enough that I don't regret my time spent reading it, and having gotten this one for free, I'm willing to put less than a dollar towards another in the series, which doesn't seem to need to be read in order (
Merlin's Harp covers Arthur through his death; I assume the others are reasonably standalone since they follow Gawain and Percival through their careers, respectively).
As for the e-book edition, Amazon's Mobi version had some very minor formatting errors. Occasional no-indent text for a couple of lines of dialogue, a few words run together without spaces from time to time, italics starting or ending prematurely icertain phrases, but nothing terribly wrong. Though it would have looked much better with less space between paragraphs and some curly quotes.
Also, I should mention that characters
Speak their spells in italicized rhyme
Which to the eyes can give a hard time
and takes some getting used to, although thankfully they don't do it very often.
Very mild recommend if you like narrator-viewpoint-centric pagan-tilted Arthurian retellings with a bit of Fey-oriented fantasy (use of magic was low-key and matter-of-fact, rather than grand epic). While it's not an outstandingly good book with universal try-this-to-check-out-the-subgenre appeal, it's decent enough reading if this is the kind of thing you already like to read to begin with.