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Title: The Camelot Betrayal
Author: Kiersten White
Sub-genre: Fantasy
If you’ve been around here for any length of time, you know how much I love Kiersten White. She’s an auto buy for me, and while I usually make myself wait for paperback versions to come out, since I got the first book in this series, Guinevere Deception, in hardback thanks to Owl Crate, I figured I should go for the matching copy (the only thing I hate more than reading hardbacks is having my series set not match, boo). Despite this book feeling like a lot of set up for the inevitable next book, overall it was an enjoyable read.
Guinevere is struggling. On the surface, everything looks to be as it should, but inside, she is fighting to figure out who she is and what her place is within Camelot. Her relationship with Arthur is fine. Which is good, but she is hoping for a marriage that is more than fine. Arthur doesn’t give her decidedly not just fine feelings like Mordred does, and that fact continues to haunt her. Guinevere has friends in Brangien and Lancelot, but they are also struggling to earn their true desires–Brangien’s being her lost love Isolde and Lancelot’s being the respect she craves from Arthur and the other knights. Not going to lie, not a lot happens in this book. There is no major battle or force to overcome, it really is a book about Guinevere’s self discovery–how she feels about her magic, her place in society, her friends, her lovers, her past, and her future. It mostly poses a lot of questions which I’m assuming will (hopefully) be answered in the next book.
Despite there not being a ton of action to drive the plot of this book forward, I still found it compulsively readable. I didn’t want to stop reading, and I was very interested to see where things were going to go with Guinevere’s inner turmoil, and with her relationships to the people around her. I actually kind of liked that this was a little quieter of a fantasy, I felt like it allowed me to really focus on the characters and get into their heads, which is something I enjoy. I will say, I definitely was looking forward to some romantic/sexual tension with Lancelot, and that doesn’t really happen here. I hope that is something that is a part of book three as I think it is an essential component of the original story. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what the next book has in store for us!
Overall Rating: 4.5 stars