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Dec. 27th, 2021 10:57 amA year and a half later, I have finally read Sword in the Stars, the sequel to Amy Rose Capetta and Cori McCarthy's wild YA space opera Arthuriana Once & Future.
This was an interesting reading experience for me because, on the one hand, I disagreed with many more of the specific plot and thematic choices than in the first book, making it a much more complicated level of enjoyment than the joyous roller coaster of the first book, and on the other hand I still have such a tremendous respect for the authors' delightfully devil-may-care attitude towards throwing a whole bunch of Arthurian canon at the wall and then joyously re-shuffling it around in whatever way they feel like. Kay is Lancelot is Arthur is teen protagonist Ari whose brother is Kay: SURE! Merlin is simultaneously aging backwards and forwards and apprenticing himself to himself: WHY NOT! Guinevere is insistent that her baby is NOT Mordred and everyone else is like 'well we don't see any OTHER Mordred candidates around here' and Guinevere is like 'MORDRED IS NEVER GWEN'S BABY IN ANY VERSION OF THE ARTHURIAN CANON, LEAVE ME ALONE' so who is Guinevere's baby? The Answer May Surprise You! ( spoiler ) I love feeling like I'm in the hands of writers who know and love the legend and are really enjoying taking it apart and putting it back together again in ways that consistently made me shriek.
Some stuff I personally did not like so much:
- I love an enthusiastically queer retelling as much as the next person and I'm sure a lot of the choices in here will make many people feel really validated and that's so lovely, but an unironic "that planet was hella problematic" (direct quote!) re: Earth from one of the few survivors of a current and ongoing future space genocide campaign pushes all the way to the farthest reaches of my own personal present-day-spacetime-exceptionalism secondhand embarrassment filter
- "the Arthurian cycle is a neverending tragedy perpetual motion machine propelled onwards by the spark of hope in a better future" great! wonderful! ( vague conclusion spoilers )
- ok back to the secondhand embarrassment: love intertextuality, fully covering my face at the fact that the book takes a whole page of the epilogue to have Merlin explain the term 'queerbaiting' to his Future Boyfriend just in order to rag on the TV show Merlin (2008). Just keep telling myself that Someone Who Is Not Me Feels Very Seen By This.
- after all of the affectionately weird Kay plot in the last book, the pendulum swings all the way back at me and in this book Original Kay is uncomplicatedly bad and the only knight to get kicked out of the Round Table >:(( dislike >:((( lay off my horrible fave >:((((
I know there have been at least three or four other Teen Arthurs published over the past year or two and I keep meaning to keep track of them and then forgetting, so please do remind me what they are so I can add them to the Collection!
This was an interesting reading experience for me because, on the one hand, I disagreed with many more of the specific plot and thematic choices than in the first book, making it a much more complicated level of enjoyment than the joyous roller coaster of the first book, and on the other hand I still have such a tremendous respect for the authors' delightfully devil-may-care attitude towards throwing a whole bunch of Arthurian canon at the wall and then joyously re-shuffling it around in whatever way they feel like. Kay is Lancelot is Arthur is teen protagonist Ari whose brother is Kay: SURE! Merlin is simultaneously aging backwards and forwards and apprenticing himself to himself: WHY NOT! Guinevere is insistent that her baby is NOT Mordred and everyone else is like 'well we don't see any OTHER Mordred candidates around here' and Guinevere is like 'MORDRED IS NEVER GWEN'S BABY IN ANY VERSION OF THE ARTHURIAN CANON, LEAVE ME ALONE' so who is Guinevere's baby? The Answer May Surprise You! ( spoiler ) I love feeling like I'm in the hands of writers who know and love the legend and are really enjoying taking it apart and putting it back together again in ways that consistently made me shriek.
Some stuff I personally did not like so much:
- I love an enthusiastically queer retelling as much as the next person and I'm sure a lot of the choices in here will make many people feel really validated and that's so lovely, but an unironic "that planet was hella problematic" (direct quote!) re: Earth from one of the few survivors of a current and ongoing future space genocide campaign pushes all the way to the farthest reaches of my own personal present-day-spacetime-exceptionalism secondhand embarrassment filter
- "the Arthurian cycle is a neverending tragedy perpetual motion machine propelled onwards by the spark of hope in a better future" great! wonderful! ( vague conclusion spoilers )
- ok back to the secondhand embarrassment: love intertextuality, fully covering my face at the fact that the book takes a whole page of the epilogue to have Merlin explain the term 'queerbaiting' to his Future Boyfriend just in order to rag on the TV show Merlin (2008). Just keep telling myself that Someone Who Is Not Me Feels Very Seen By This.
- after all of the affectionately weird Kay plot in the last book, the pendulum swings all the way back at me and in this book Original Kay is uncomplicatedly bad and the only knight to get kicked out of the Round Table >:(( dislike >:((( lay off my horrible fave >:((((
I know there have been at least three or four other Teen Arthurs published over the past year or two and I keep meaning to keep track of them and then forgetting, so please do remind me what they are so I can add them to the Collection!
