soph (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophia_sol) wrote2023-03-20 10:05 am
sophia_sol) wrote2023-03-20 10:05 am
Spear, by Nicola Griffith
A novella about the Matter of Britain, featuring Percival the Grail Knight as a young woman. Griffith's prose is beautiful, and she's doing some interesting things with this interpretation, and I found the beginning of the book compelling, but ultimately....idk, I finished the book feeling oddly dissatisfied. I'm not sure what I wanted done differently, I'm not sure what wasn't working for me.
Maybe it's that I don't feel like I got a good enough sense of why being one of the Companions of King Arthur was what she wanted, why it met her goals in life and what she was looking to be able to do? And although I loved the early stuff about her relationship with Nimuë, with the immediate unsettling magical brain-connection thing, I don't feel like I saw enough of why it was a thing that was able to just...settle into an unfraught ending together.
The ending isn't uncomplicatedly happy – her mother is dead, the Arthur/Guinivere/Lancelot triad is unable to produce an heir to the throne, the influence of the sword on Arthur is problems. But I still don't feel like the happy parts actually felt earned.
Dangit I wanted to like this book!!
Maybe it's that I don't feel like I got a good enough sense of why being one of the Companions of King Arthur was what she wanted, why it met her goals in life and what she was looking to be able to do? And although I loved the early stuff about her relationship with Nimuë, with the immediate unsettling magical brain-connection thing, I don't feel like I saw enough of why it was a thing that was able to just...settle into an unfraught ending together.
The ending isn't uncomplicatedly happy – her mother is dead, the Arthur/Guinivere/Lancelot triad is unable to produce an heir to the throne, the influence of the sword on Arthur is problems. But I still don't feel like the happy parts actually felt earned.
Dangit I wanted to like this book!!