This book is an excellent example of quality YA titles. If you like Young Adult novels and have any fond memories at all of reading about King Arthur, this is going to be right up your alley.
Plot: Guinevere is on her way to marry King Arthur. Only it’s not Guinevere! It’s a sorceress who has been trained by Merlin to protect Arthur in secret because they’ve had to ban magic use within Camelot. Only maybe that’s not the whole story?
This book does an excellent job of world building in a way that doesn’t feel painfully exposition heavy. As you can see, the book isn’t heavy on plot. The focus is really on setting all the pieces and characters in place for what I imagine is going to be a Big To Do in the next one. And it is leaning heavily on the recently very popular angle of taking an old story featuring a male lead and re-envisioning that story from the perspective of the female characters, as if they actually mattered. I’m a fan of this revisionist approach to well established myths.
This book has everything. A potential love triangle, secret identities, secret identities secret from the people who have the secret identity, secret identities secret from the people who think they know the secret identity, feats of strength competitions, road trips, creepy allies being clearly set up as being enemies in the next book. It has low magic, high magic, pretty dresses, court intrigue, and camping!