Tannat

I wanted to give this book a fair chance, and I figured I would at least find it okay, but…no.  I did read the whole thing, but I didn’t like it all.  I’m not sure what book everyone who loved it was reading, but I suspect it was it was in another language or something.  Just kidding.   It’s just weird when well-known works fall flat for you.  Especially this flat (I basically docked it half a star for being so long).

I was expecting a retelling of the Arthurian legends with strong female characters.  What I got was almost a thousand pages of family dinner parties with courtly gossip and a lot of whining.  There were some strong female characters, but their logic (and that of the other characters) seemed to be sacrificed for reasons of plot and compliance to the legends as the book went on.  I’m not that familiar with the actual Arthurian legends, though, so I’m working off of hearsay here that they do comply.

I did find it interesting that Gwenhwyfar started off as a scared, agoraphobic rabbit, but she became tiresome once she started morphing into that pathetic, paranoid creature she becomes.  She doesn’t make any references to failing eyesight earlier, though, so mentioning it as a possible explanation near the end felt odd.

I was looking forward to reading Morgaine’s story, but then the narrative started branching out into more and more POV characters (even though it is still Morgaine essentially telling the story I guess), and it seemed like the whole thing got bogged down even more.  I just wanted to go back to Morgaine!  And then even Morgaine started becoming tiresome…and whiny.  When the narrative POV was jumping around, it wasn’t always immediately clear it had jumped either.

Finally, ellipses were definitely overused.  I wanted to physically yank those three dots away from the author (impossible at this stage, I know).  I’m not a big fan of dream sequences either (I don’t find them well done normally), and they were also overused in this book.

This is definitely all subjective, but if any of the above throws up a red flag for you, you may want to give it a pass despite all the glowing reviews.  I’m open to any suggestions for Arthurian legend books that I might like better.