GREAT GREEK GODS. THEY ARE COMING.
Foster kid and occasional shoplifter Eowlyn Patience just wants to fit into her Boston high school. When the Sword In The Stone falls out of the sky like a meteor into the middle of London’s Trafalgar Square, everything changes. Then, an enigmatic golden-eyed man arranges for her to attend a school for the gifted in England, and the irritatingly perfect Matt Emrys from science class turns out to be Merlin—the Merlin, King Arthur’s greatest wizard.
Frozen in a cave for fifteen hundred years, Merlin has woken to find the next Arthur. Eowlyn Patience’s mysterious admittance to Avalon Preparatory was not something he foresaw…a disturbing aberration when his most powerful gift happens to be visions of the future.
The race to find the rightful heir rages between deadly gargoyles, wizards, and Regulars, but figuring out the troubled Eowlyn might be by-the-book Merlin’s hardest job yet. She’s altogether the wrong girl. Torn between what is right and what saves lives, will Eowlyn do what it takes to win—even if it means sacrificing Merlin to a god?
They say everyone remembers the day when…the colossal something happens. The world seems to stop, and in that moment, we are all one. On just such a day, near the outskirts of Boston, in the small town of Concord, next to Minuteman Park and the first battle of the American Revolution, I got caught by the security guard at the local mall.
“Owwwl-lynne,” the guard slowly pronounced. “That’s your name?”
I folded my arms in front of myself and puffed out my chest. “Eowlyn. Pronounced A-O-Lin.”
The guard couldn’t see me tremble inside. If I got in trouble one more time, I’d go back to the halfway house and I didn’t want to go there. Sleeping with one hand on a butter knife was not as glamourous as it sounded. I smiled prettily at him. “I didn’t take anything.”
The guard snorted. He opened a paper shopping bag and pulled out a blue ballgown. He smiled with yellow teeth and shook the cascading fabric in my face. “You didn’t take anything because I caught you. You had a dress stuffed down your pants.”
Review
This book’s description really grabbed me. I’m a big fan of mythology stories, and I like a good helping of Arthurian lore, too. Toss in a magic school, and you basically had me at hello. Unfortunately, I wasn’t as drawn in by this as I hoped, which was disappointing.
The concept for this story is fantastic. The sword in the stone lands in modern-day America, and everyone’s after it. That set up for a lot of great tension, both on political and personal levels. I found the world fascinating and really wanted to dig into the consequences of King Arthur (or his successor) coming to power.
The execution, though, didn’t quite work for me. Once the sword dropped, so many things started happening at once, and many of them didn’t feel adequately explained or alluded to. The story picked up speed at an alarming rate, and I felt left in the wake of a train that was hurdling down the tracks just fast enough for me to keep it in sight but too fast for me to see any details. As a result, I got lost fairly quickly, and the scenes that followed couldn’t get me back on track.
I had a tough time connecting with Eowlyn. I felt for her in the first scene when she didn’t want to go back to foster care. As time went on, though, she hardened to a point where I just couldn’t feel real emotions from her. She spent a lot of time getting into arguments with other characters that didn’t seem to resolve anything. I wasn’t even sure what the reasons behind some of the arguments were. The other characters didn’t stand out for me. Each seemed to have a prominent personality trait that was almost always at the forefront, and they didn’t quite feel like real people. I also wasn’t sure if some of the characters were reincarnations of figures from Arthurian legend or the actual people who just lived a very long time. They were teenagers, but they were hundreds of years old. Those characters also spoke in an odd mix of formal and modern slang, which really tripped me up. I couldn’t find a pattern or reason for the changes, which just left me wondering why they kept alternating between styles.
The characters combined with the story jumping ahead without me meant I just couldn’t get into this like I wanted to. After a while, the action sequences seemed to repeat themselves, and the plot twists confused me. There was a hierarchical struggle between wizards and gargoyles, which was fine. There were also distinctions of magical and non-magical students at the school that I didn’t understand at all. Some students used magic. Some didn’t, I think, and others were candidates to pull the sword from the stone, but I was unsure if they also used magic. With some more clarification and fleshing out of the characters, I could have truly loved this. As it is, it was a great concept with an execution I couldn’t follow.
Priya Ardis loves books of all kinds–but especially the ones which make your nose leak and let your chai go cold. Her novels come from a childhood of playing too much She-Ra and watching too much Spock. Her bestselling series, My Boyfriend Merlin, about Merlin going to high school is a YA contemporary fantasy and romance for those like road trips, wizards, Greek gods, and gender-bent quests. Find her online at http://www.priyaardis.com
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All the opinions expressed in this review are my own. Read the full disclosure here.