Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | J FICTION REE | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Welcome to the dark side of Camelot.
Gwynna is just a girl who is forced to run when her village is attacked and burns to the ground. To her horror, she is discovered in the wood. But it is Myrddin the bard who has found her, a traveler and spinner of tales. He agrees to protect Gwynna if she will agree to be bound in service to him. Gwynna is frightened but intrigued-and says yes-for this Myrddin serves the young, rough, and powerful Arthur. In the course of their travels, Myrddin transforms Gwynna into the mysterious Lady of the Lake, a boy warrior, and a spy. It is part of a plot to transform Arthur from the leader of (con't)
Author Notes
Philip Reeve is the bestselling author of the Predator Cities quartet and the award-winning Fever Crumb series. His other books include the highly acclaimed HERE LIES ARTHUR and NO SUCH THING AS DRAGONS. He lives in Dartmoor, England with his wife and son. Visit him online at philip-reeve.com.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The last word is "Hope," yet Reeve (Mortal Engines) injects deep cynicism into every other phrase of this Arthurian fable. As he tells it, Myrddin the "enchanter" is a charlatan of high degree, possessing no magic but a mastery of storytelling and fraud. Gwyna, the narrator, is perhaps nine years old when Myrddin sees her swim down a river to escape a house set afire by callous, marauding warlord Arthur. Myrddin promptly disguises her first as the Lady of the Lake and then as a boy apprentice. Gwyna soon learns to trust no one, doubt everything and scorn both male and female roles. She even becomes skeptical of the empire-building ambition behind Myrddin's efforts to recast Arthur's unremarkable exploits as the stuff of legend. Nodding to canon and history while not particularly following either (Lancelot and Morgan le Fay are notably absent), Reeve, like Myrddin, turns hallowed myth and supple prose to political purposes, neatly skewering the modern-day cult of spin and the age-old trickery behind it. Smart teens will love this. Ages 12-up. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(High School) Reeve's brilliant, brutal re-creation of Arthurian myth is a study in balance and contradiction: it is bleak yet tender; impeccably historical, yet distinctly timely in its driving sense of disillusionment. Reeve's Arthur is just another brigand vying for loot and power; it is Myrddin, a scheming storyteller convinced that Arthur can unite Britain against the encroaching Saxons, who methodically sets him up as iconic hero. Rescued by Myrddin after Arthur's soldiers burn her home to the ground, narrator Gwyna's first task is to play the lady of the lake and bestow upon Arthur his legendary sword. She then joins Arthur's band -- as a boy; when she grows too old for that deception, she becomes handmaiden to Arthur's new, unloved wife Gwenhwyfar. Reeve's prose is vivid (Gwyna sees Arthur's invaders "heaving uphill on a steep sea of horse muscle"), and his characters -- notably Gwyna, with her "quickness and cunning" and keen survival instinct, and Myrddin, with his ruthless agenda and rare flashes of humanity -- remain true to themselves within an ever-intensifying plot. The relationship between story and history, myth and reality, is richly explored by a narrator whose very self is a conscious creation; gender is just one of many concepts Reeve subverts here with a deft hand. The well-known touchstones of Arthurian legend are cleverly alluded to and undercut throughout, and Myrddin's constant myth-spinning heightens readers' awareness of the painful contrast between the cruelties that shape this novel and the utopian dream Arthur represents elsewhere in literature. From HORN BOOK, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Powerfully inventive, yet less romanticized than most stories set in the medieval Britain, this novel retells the story of King Arthur from a fresh perspective. Readers first glimpse Gwyna, the novel's disarming narrator, as a snot-nosed girl hiding in the brambles from a marauding band of brutes led by Arthur, the King that Was and Will Be. Taken under the wing of the king's bard and advisor, Myddrin (the Merlin figure), who disguises her first as a lad and then as that fictional lad's half sister, Gwyna takes part in or observes many significant scenes, from the day Arthur takes the sword offered by a lady beneath a lake until the day of his death. In Gwyna's telling, many traditionally esteemed characters are revealed as unworthy, and some reviled ones are shown as heroic. Seemingly supernatural elements of the storied events are shown to be mere conjuring tricks, while the most magical power that Myddrin wields is the creative storytelling that shapes history into legend and makes it immortal. Events rush headlong toward the inevitable ending, but Gwyna's observations illuminate them in a new way. Arthurian lore has inspired many novels for young people, but few as arresting or compelling as this one.--Phelan, Carolyn Copyright 2008 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
Gr 8 Up-Reeve offers up a revisionist retelling of the Arthurian legend, set in southwest Britain in A.D. 500, and exposing the dark side of Camelot. Arthur is a brutal, bullying tyrant, and not terribly bright. His fame stems solely from the stories spun by Myrrdin, a traveling bard and trickster. But this story is not primarily Arthur's. It is Gwyna's, a child who is rescued by Myrddin when her village is sacked and burned. Myrrdin takes her under his care, disguising her first as the Lady of the Lake, and then as a boy. When adolescence arrives, Myrrdin reintroduces her to Arthur's court as a maid and she falls in love with Peredur, who has spent his childhood disguised as a girl. While the switching sexual identities may keep readers a bit off kilter, having the narrator be both Gwyn and Gwyna allows a dual perspective on Arthurian times. Reeve does not shy away from violence and gory battle scenes. When Arthur learns that his wife Gwenhwyfar is committing adultery with his young nephew, he beats and beheads Bedwyr in a particularly bloody episode. Gwenhwyfar is driven to suicide. Gwyna learns that Arthur's heroism and fame stem not from magic and noble deeds but rather from the stories Myrrdin spins. Indeed, with his death, she picks up his mantle. The power of stories is a theme of the novel. Reeve's usual lyrical, cinematic prose underscores the message that in the end perhaps they are the only things that matter. A multilayered tour de force for mature young readers.-Connie Tyrrell Burns, Mahoney Middle School, South Portland, ME (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
In this brilliant version of the Camelot story, Philip Reeve scrubs off all that late-medieval gloss about gallant knights and a round table, and returns Arthur to the place where he more probably belongs - a sixth-century mud-and-blood bath of brute force and low cunning. This Arthur, then, is not Malory's Christian king but a bristling hog of a man who is "just a little tyrant in an age of tyrants". He blunders about a small strip of the West Country bagging tributes from lesser bullies and rustling up boundary wars as a way of keeping his men sharp and loyal. Guinevere, meanwhile, is not a fallen angel in a wimple but Gwenhwyfar, a twice-widowed woman nudging into middle-age, and so white and stalky that Arthur's men sniggeringly dub her "the old heron". When she eventually succumbs to adultery, it is not with Lancelot but Bedwyr, the prototype for Sir Bedivere, a boy-man young enough to be her son. Not content with this clever bit of re-visioning, Reeve suggests the engine by which Arthur will be magicked for posterity from superstitious thug to Christ's soldier. Myrddin is the tatty old bard whose job it is to spin Arthur's straggly battles into something that sound heroic when retold around the hunting fire. So convinced, indeed, is Myrddin (anyone with a scrap of Welsh will soon have him pegged for Merlin) of the power of stories to motivate men that he even sets up the whole "lady in the lake" scenario as a way of boosting Arthur's self-belief. Far from a water-goddess offering the supernatural Excalibur, the trick is performed by Myrddin's little servant girl bobbing up from the shallows to offer a common-or-garden blade, called Caliburn, to the passing warlord. It is this girl, Gwyna, who is our narrator and it is her job, too, to nail the fact that what so often passes for magic in the Arthur cult is merely Myrdinn's sleight of hand. For, as the old man impatiently tells her from the start, "I'm just a traveller who has picked up a few handy conjuring tricks along the road." Thus Gwyna's several switches of gender throughout the story, from girl to boy and back again, have nothing to do with the uncanny powers of the changeling but are simply disguises seized upon to get her through the next rough patch. Sometimes - when she needs a safe haven at Gwenhwyfar's court, for instance - it makes sense to be Gwyna, a plain maid who will never catch any man's eye. At other times, tagging along with Arthur's troops, it is more suitable to be Gwyn, a beardless youth who rides like a demon and swims like a fish. Anyone who enjoyed Kevin Crossley-Holland's re-telling of the Arthur stories will surely love Reeve's equally bold version, set 700 years earlier. While there is no getting away from the brutality of Reeve's dark-ages version, the material is handled sensitively enough for the average bloodthirsty 10-year-old. Particularly useful is the way that Reeve asks his young readers to think carefully about the way that stories harden into official narratives when enough people are prepared to believe them. Kathryn Hughes's The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton is published by Harper Perennial. To order Here Lies Arthur for pounds 11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-reevskids.1 It is this girl, Gwyna, who is our narrator and it is her job, too, to nail the fact that what so often passes for magic in the [Arthur] cult is merely Myrdinn's sleight of hand. For, as the old man impatiently tells her from the start, "I'm just a traveller who has picked up a few handy conjuring tricks along the road." Thus Gwyna's several switches of gender throughout the story, from girl to boy and back again, have nothing to do with the uncanny powers of the changeling but are simply disguises seized upon to get her through the next rough patch. Sometimes - when she needs a safe haven at Gwenhwyfar's court, for instance - it makes sense to be Gwyna, a plain maid who will never catch any man's eye. At other times, tagging along with Arthur's troops, it is more suitable to be Gwyn, a beardless youth who rides like a demon and swims like a fish. - Kathryn Hughes.
Kirkus Review
Is there room for yet another reworking of the Arthur legend? If it's this one, yes. Reeve imagines a turn-of-the-fifth-century Britain abandoned by the Romans, with Saxons poised in the East to sweep across the West, which is held, uneasily, by a motley collection of warring warlords. Into this disarray rides Arthur's warband, with Myrddin at his side to spin his story. Gwyna, newly homeless by Arthur and his thugs, finds herself pressed into a legend-making role as the Lady of the Lake and then into Myrddin's service as a boy, Gwyn. It's a hard-edged, unromantic examination of Dark Ages realpolitik. As Myrddin tells Gwyna, "There's nothing a man can do that can't be turned into a taleI am the story-spinning physician who keeps [Arthur's] reputation in good health." But it's Gwyna who, horror-struck, sees Gwenhwyfar and Bedwyr's ill-fated affair and its bloody aftermath, sees Arthur's rout at the hands of his nephew Medrawt, buries Myrddin in the trunk of an oak in midwinter and begins to spin her own tales. Absorbing, thought-provoking and unexpectedly timely. (Historical fiction. 12 up) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
