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Showing posts with label historical fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label historical fiction. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 21, 2021

Reviewer Wesley Britton Suggests You Dive Into This Camelot Tale

TITLE: The Priestess of Camelot: 

SERIES: Prequel to The Heirs to Camelot

AUTHOR: Jacqueline Church Simonds

Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 28, 2018

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07HSYTNRT

PURCHASE


Reviewed by Dr. Wesley Britton


Reviewer Wesley Britton Suggests You Dive Into This Camelot Tale

I suppose nearly everyone alive has experienced more than one version of the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table from the songs of Lerner and Loewe in their Camelot to the craziness of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.   In literature, we’ve seen everything from Thomas Malory’s 1485 Le Morte d’Arthur to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1859 Idylls of the King to T.H. White’s 1958  The Once and Future King to my personal favorite, Bernard Cornwell’s earthy Warlord trilogy.

With such a plethora of reworkings of the classic stories, is it possible to give the much revamped canvas any new twists? It seems so. Jacqueline Church Simonds has indeed taken the epic where it hasn’t trodden before. For one key matter, her version of the legend centers on a female lead, Anya, a goddess-worshipping priestess of the Nordic Rus tribes. In Britain, she joins the sisterhood of Avalon, headed by Arthur’s archnemesis, Morgaine.

In time,  Anya travels to Camelot where she falls in love with Merlin and bears him a son. Then, she falls in love with Arthur and also bears him a son. Then, in a magical ritual in a sacred grove,  she has a sort of “immaculate conception” where the goddess impregnates Anya with the fatherless daughter.  Now, that’s a vivid, memorable scene.

Back in the beginning of the tale, Anya is seduced by Morgaine which sets the stage for a series of very erotic encounters.  Malory nor Tennyson nor White ever ventured into this territory but, not having read every modern recasting of the Roundtable saga,  I can’t attest as to whether or not Church Simonds is breaking new ground here.  All I can safely say is that The Priestess of Camelot is not YA material.

To be fair, the book is far more than a series of romances. Anya is a very developed, vividly painted character who becomes a leader in her region, demonstrating her skills by protecting her neighbors in a time where Christianity is doing its best to quash goddess worship.   Because of the visions the goddess occasionally shares with Anya, the priestess sets about making it possible for goddess worship to return to Britain   1,500 years in the future led by her heirs, the descendants of Merlin, Arthur, and the goddess.


So, The Priestess of Camelot sets the stage for Church Simonds’ Heirs to Camelot series including The Midsummer Wife,   The Solstice Bride, and The Mistress of the Rose Moon. All of these titles are available now, so if The Priestess of Camelot grabs your imagination, you can dive into a non-stop trip into a new avenue of Arthurian lore. Maybe you’ll fall in love with Anya yourself. You’d be in good company.

 

 

More About the Reviewer

Dr. Wesley Britton, an author in his own right,  reviews regularly for this blog and rBookPleasures.com.


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 The New Book Review is blogged by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally series of books for writers. Authors, readers, publishers, and reviewers may republish their favorite reviews of books they want to share with others. That includes authors who want to share their favorite reviews, reviewers who'd like to see their reviews get more exposure, and readers who want to shout out praise of books they've read and love. Please see submission guidelines in a tab at the top of this blog's home page or go directly to the submission guidelines at http://bit.ly/ThePlacetoRecycleBookReviews or to the guideline tab at the top of the home page of this blog. Authors and publishers who do not yet have reviews or want more may use Lois W. Stern's "Authors Helping Authors" service for requesting reviews. Find her guidelines in a tab at the top of the home page, too. Carolyn Wilhelm is our IT expert, an award-winning author, a veteran educator and also contributes reviews and posts on other topics related to books. Reviews, interviews, and articles on this blog are indexed by genre, reviewers' names, and review sites so #TheNewBookReview may be used as a resource for most anyone in the publishing industry. As an example, writers will find this blog's search engine handy for gleaning the names of small publishers. Find other writer-related blogs at Sharing with Writers and The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor. #TheFrugalbookPromoter, #CarolynHowardJohnson, #TheNewBookReview, #TheFrugalEditor, #SharingwithWriters, #reading #BookReviews #GreatBkReviews #BookMarketing

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Orphan Train Girl by Christina Baker Kline Book Review

MORE ABOUT THIS BLOG The New Book Review is blogged by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally series of books for writers. It is a free service offered to those who want to encourage the reading of books they love. That includes authors who want to share their favorite reviews, reviewers who'd like to see their reviews get more exposure, and readers who want to shout out praise of books they've read. Please see submission guidelines on the left of this page. Reviews and essays are indexed by genre, reviewer names, and review sites. Writers will find the search engine handy for gleaning the names of small publishers. Find other writer-related blogs at Sharing with Writers and The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor.

Orphan Train Girl by Christina Baker Kline Book Review

Orphan-Train-Christina-Baker-Kline

  • Age Range: 8 - 12 years
  • Grade Level: 3 - 7
  • Paperback: 240 pages
  • Publisher: HarperCollins; Young Readers' ed. edition (May 1, 2018)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0062445952
  • ISBN-13: 978-0062445957
  • Review posted on Amazon

This story really captured my heart and is still tugging at it! We adopted a daughter from Korea as an infant and so the topic of adoption is one familiar to me. I had no idea there were 250,000 American orphans on trains between 1854 and 1929. Most were new immigrants to this country. The author has met eleven of them. She has completed extensive research on the topic including travel to Ireland. This is such a powerful story told about an "older" girl of nine. Babies and older boys were adopted first, and many of the older children had to do extensive work (sometimes not being allowed to attend school). 

Orphan-Train-Christina-Baker-Kline

My interest in this topic began with a story a writing group member wrote about not knowing her heritage. She had her DNA tested as her mother was an orphan from one of these trains. At the age of two, her mother was sent from New York to Minnesota. Record keeping was not well done at the time and so little was known about what country her mother was from. Of course, Ancestry DNA testing is fairly vague. Only DNA testing from a doctor's office provides much information. Yet, the writer said she learned a few things and would have still tried the test had she realized it would not provide detailed information. 
In the book Orphan Train Girl, they are able to find photos and even news articles to help them figure out a few things. A young orphan is helping an older person who was one of these orphans as a community service project. The reason for the service project is not only based on good intentions, but the two characters become friends. The younger one knows how to research on Google to help create a somewhat dramatic ending. I'm not sure how often people could actually find very much information on this topic, though. 
My next read is the first version of the book. I had no idea I was reading an adaptation of the story for middle school students and that there was a different version which had been a best-seller when I started reading. My interest is piqued!

Christina Baker Kline is the author of a New York Times bestseller A Piece of the World (2017), Christina’s World. Kline has written six other novels: Orphan Train, Orphan Train Girl, The Way Life Should Be, Sweet Water, Bird in Hand, and Desire Lines.. Her 2013 novel Orphan Train spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list. Her adaptation of Orphan Train for young readers is Orphan Train Girl. 

Thank you for reading, Carolyn Wilhelm, Wise Owl Factory

Orphan Train Girl by Christina Baker Kline Book Review