Often times, if I’m reading heavily in a particular genre, or on a theme, I’m aware of it and have gone out of my way to do so. Not this time! No, I suddenly realized after finishing the first book on this list that I had been reading a lot of King Arthur and Camelot retellings recently, and what were the chances? I decided I needed to continue the trend and in doing so, take some things off my to be read pile. And maybe I also needed to make a list of other King Arthur and Camelot books and retellings, because if there’s one thing I love, it’s a list. Now, join me around the Table of Some Shape and let’s read!
“Gwen & Art Are Not in Love” by Lex Croucher is a young adult romance novel set hundreds of years after the time of King Arthur and his knights, but is still firmly in what we would consider medieval England. Our two POV characters are Gwendoline, a bit of a shut-in upright young woman, the daughter of the current king, sister of Gabriel the prince, and most unfortunately for her, betrothed to Arthur, our other POV. Arthur (Art to his friends), is a bit of a party animal, enjoys causing chaos for his father, and generally tries not to live up to his namesake. Besides their disparate personalities, why are these two not meant to be? Well, for starters, as the summer tournament begins, Gwen catches Art kissing a boy, and Art in turn finds Gwen’s diaries where she’s written about her feelings for the land’s only lady knight, Bridget Leclair. Slightly awkward. The two decide to keep one another’s secrets, and perhaps even help each other where they can. This book was funny, heartwarming, exciting and sweet. 
“Once & Future Vol. 1” by Kieron Gillen sure is… something. The idea is that King Arthur will come back to save Britain from its darkest hour; what that darkest hour is or will be varies, as you can imagine. In this series however, King Arthur is brought back by a bunch of white nationalists, and when this happens, Bridgette McGuire pulls her unsuspecting grandson Duncan into a world of magic, myth, and mayhem. You see, Bridgette is semi-retired from monster hunting, and is at least partly responsible for keeping magic from seeping into the regular world. Bringing King Arthur back from the dead: at least somewhat magical, and she’ll need Duncan’s help this time. The whole series spans only five collected volumes, not a terribly long run in comics. And the amount of ideas about myths and magic and stories and how they all work gets crammed in around fight scenes, family drama, and other frivolous pages. The art is great, the story telling is heavily lacking. Kieron Gillen so clearly has an interest in old myths and stories, bringing them into the current day and retelling them through a modern lens. This was done to some effect in “The Wicked + The Divine”, although that certainly had issues as well. Personally, this didn’t even work as a popcorn read (turn your brain off and enjoy) for me, but your mileage may vary.
“Legendborn” by Tracy Deonn was a title I specifically wanted to get to in 2024, and hey, I did it! 16-year-old Bree Matthews has been accepted early to UNC Chapel Hill, the same school her mother went to. The same mother who died in a car accident earlier in the year, and now Bree is trying to get away from her hometown and the memories of her mother, trying to start over. Luckily, if you can call it that, on her first night at school, Bree sees something she’s definitely not supposed to see: magic. Which helps her realize there was more weirdness the night her mother died than she initially remembered. Bree sets off to find out more about the magic she saw, and hopefully get some answers about her mother in the process.
I have such mixed feelings about this book. It got so much hype upon publication and has continued to have hype as the series has continued. I do think the hype is deserved, mostly. My critiques are very similar to some of the biggest critiques this book has gotten, which is it does worldbuilding and lore in large exposition dumps, and it can be very confusing to figure out what terms mean, and in a lot of cases, they don’t end up really mattering? Which unfortunately, is kind of true about many of the side characters — there are just so many of them, the names run together, and some scenes late in the book lose their impact when I’m trying to remember if we’re meant to like that person or not. Possibly my biggest issue runs into spoiler territory, but if you were reading YA in the 2010s, you can guess what it is. This might make it sound like I disliked the book, and that’s not at all the case. I thought Tracy Deonn did a phenomenal job showcasing the grief one feels after they’ve lost a family member, and this book looks racism right in its eye and spits in it. At this point, the first two books in the series are out, with four planned overall. I’ll be picking up the sequel in the next month or so, and I’m really curious to see the plot and character arcs develop, because I know it can be so great. 
“Spear” by Nicola Griffith is actually a reread for me, but I enjoyed it so much the first time that I was happy to pick it up again for this project. This was meant to be a short story for the “Sword Stone Table” anthology, but Griffith told the editors the story was getting out of hand, and it wouldn’t be available for the collection. In this novella, we follow a young woman later known as Peretur, although she is given no name by her mother. Peretur’s mother is in hiding, and tells her daughter the stories and tales of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Irish gods, for lack of a better way to describe them. Peretur knows that her fate is out in the world, and when she comes into contact with the Companions of Arturus, she sets out for Caer Leon to make a name for herself and to find the mystical lake that haunts her dreams.
Because it is a novella, it’s hard to talk too much about the story without giving spoilers, but take a basic King Arthur plot, make it queer, make it more queer, set it in Wales, have the story actually be about Percival, and give it some beautiful writing, and you have this story. I recommend the audiobook especially, to hear the pronunciation of all the Welsh and Gaelic names and terms. I meant to listen to this on audio for my reread, and then fell asleep, but that is an indictment of me, not the quality of the book or the narrator! I would pair this with “This Is How You Lose the Time War” in terms of quality of writing.
Theoretically I might take a break from the land of Camelot for a while, but I keep taking out “The Winter Knight”, and is still technically winter, albeit barely, and then there’s “Bloodmarked,” the “Legendborn” sequel, and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” is always worth a rewatch… Camelot is a silly place, but I might just stick around a while.
