Review: Original and Inventive
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 17, 2013
Warning: there are no plot spoilers in this review, but there are some "atmosphere spoilers."The best part of this story is the imaginative, inventive use of the Arthurian legends.  From what little I know of them, the bits of legend were used accurately, yet originally, and there are all sorts of unexpected twists.  The description of the land makes me wonder where the Lady of the Lake will figure into future books.  We meet Merlin as a child, we meet Uther as a supportive brother to the true king of the land.  We follow Samuel, a teen-aged gamer and the hero of the tale, as he goes from our world into a world of legend where good and evil are reduced, respectively, to maintaining or disrupting history/myth.I really liked the elements of the story and the tale itself, I felt the characters were sympathetic, although not terribly deep, and the climax battle scene was really unique.  But I had trouble buying the Lorekeeper angle and the mythological base of the other world, and there were places the writing bogged down with a few paragraphs that made me roll my eyes and put the book down for several hours because they were just too sappy.  There are few typos, but they were jarring enough to disrupt my flow.  I saw one reviewer say it was a book translated from the French, so that may explain it.More than the typos, though, the book felt like it needed the eyes of an editor.  There were a couple of places people had knowledge they shouldn't have, or maybe it was unclear whose perspective the narration was from.  I was worried that the fata expressed the moral of the story: "There is always a way... You will find it... if you truly wish it," but maybe I misread that and it was intended to say more about the fata's personality than about the main idea of the story.  Either way, that's a great trope from classic fantasy, but it teaches our young people that if they fail, it's their fault and they're now unworthy.  It seems too simple a moral for the scope of the story, and I want to see our young people taught that courage and moral choices even in the face of failure matter more than some flashy victory.But I give the book four stars for the originality, the imagination, the inventiveness, and the apparent accuracy of the research into the Arthurian legends.  It's hard to do a story everyone has heard 1000 times and make it interesting, but this author succeeds in that.  And the execution isn't at all bad.  It could be a superb book with some editing help.