Aaand somehow it’s Monday again already, meaning Fantasy With Friends discussion time (prompts hosted at Pages Unbound). This week’s theme is about underrated fantasy books:
What is an underrated fantasy book you would recommend?
Which is a very tricky one, so I’m going to narrow it down and give you some recommendations for books in a fantasy niche: Arthurian retellings! These are all books/series I wrote about in my MA dissertation (oh so many moons ago) on the portrayal of Sir Kay and how it was influenced by the original Welsh Cai. I’ll admit I had an absolute ball doing this “research” and reading some obscure books… though I’ll also admit that there are still some Arthurian retellings lurking on my shelves unread that I acquired but didn’t read in time, and still haven’t got round to now the frenzied moment has passed, even though it’s been a decade and change. (Sorry, Parke Godwin! I hear good things!)
First up, one of the series that actually reignited my interest in Arthurian stories, and led to my focus on Gawain and thus, indirectly, to my interest in Kay — Sarah Zettel’s Paths to Camelot books. They have different titles in different countries, and even one protagonist (who has a Welsh name) is renamed for the American edition. Pretty gross, and changing “Rhian” to “Risa” is just bizarre, but at least she’s fictional!
The first book is Camelot’s Shadow, or in the US, In Camelot’s Shadow, and it’s ultimately a retelling of ‘Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle’ and ‘The Marriage of Sir Gawain’, and is probably my favourite. I must admit that I don’t know if I’d rate these books so highly absent nostalgia, but I did find a lot to say about the ways they play with the Arthurian legends. They fixed certain things I hated, looked on certain characters with a more sympathetic (or less sympathetic) eye, and I remember them with great fondness. NB: I’d say they are romances first and foremost, but also definitely fantasy, so there is magic as well as swordplay and eventual kissing.
Next up, Cherith Baldry’s Exiled from Camelot, which is so close to Arthur/Kay (and, to be fair, Gawain/Kay) romance that it prompted my dissertation supervisor to check with me that it wasn’t, indeed, going to go there. Nope, it doesn’t, it’s just so heavy with subtext that it practically drips with it, and pretty much the highlight of the book for Kay is being held in Arthur’s arms at the end. I’m not even joking. Regardless, it also does interesting stuff with interpreting the post-Welsh portrayals of Kay and presenting him sympathetically, and I had an absolute whale of a time with it, especially the time that I live-tweeted reading it with quotations.
Finally, and probably the best written of the bunch, I present to you Phyllis Ann Karr’s Idylls of the Queen. It’s a version of the Arthurian legends sympathetic to both Kay and Guinevere, and I’ve been meaning to reread it for a while now. I remember it as being a bit funny, a bit sharp, which is very Kay.
And just to be clear, none of these recommendations are for perfect books, and there’s a certain amount of nostalgia tinting my glasses rose pink as I write. These are just retellings I had fun with, which did interesting things with the stories, and sometimes showed me a new side to characters I hadn’t been interested in before… and which not a lot of people I know have read. If you try one of ’em despite my disclaimers and don’t like it, don’t blame me!
