A review by misssusan
The Legend of the King by Gerald Morris
4.0
yesssss, he stuck the ending!
i was at an event yesterday called RA (readers' advisory) In A Day where we had a panel discussion about bad reading experiences
and i was talking about for me bad reading experiences tend to come down to poor endings
because i can usually tell if a book isn't going to work for me! if it's boring i quit and move on with my life
but sometimes books are doing something really interesting and i love the themes i'm seeing and the way the characters are being developed
and then suddenly the ending will abandon that and i'm like ???? what? why? but you were so good before, what even happened, why did you betray your character/narrative/thematic arc like that?
and i knew the ending to this series was going to be hard to pull off because king arthur is a tragedy. it's in the source material morris is working with; the battle of camlann will occur, camelot will fall, no golden age can last forever
and i was fine with that but one of my favourite things about these books have been the thread of pragmatic optimism they follow. you can tell that morris likes his characters and he thinks that people can be pretty great when they put in the effort!
(also terrible, sure, but if you had to address humanity as a whole i think these books subscribe more to locke than hobbes)
and it's hard to pull off a tragedy! it's hard to write honestly about terrible things happening while still allowing for hope. it's pretty dang easy to end up writing a tragedy that ultimately misfires and leaves you feeling like humanity sucks
but he didn't do that, this book remains wonderfully humanist
you stuck the landing, four for you gerald morris
no, i'm serious. 4 stars
i was at an event yesterday called RA (readers' advisory) In A Day where we had a panel discussion about bad reading experiences
and i was talking about for me bad reading experiences tend to come down to poor endings
because i can usually tell if a book isn't going to work for me! if it's boring i quit and move on with my life
but sometimes books are doing something really interesting and i love the themes i'm seeing and the way the characters are being developed
and then suddenly the ending will abandon that and i'm like ???? what? why? but you were so good before, what even happened, why did you betray your character/narrative/thematic arc like that?
and i knew the ending to this series was going to be hard to pull off because king arthur is a tragedy. it's in the source material morris is working with; the battle of camlann will occur, camelot will fall, no golden age can last forever
and i was fine with that but one of my favourite things about these books have been the thread of pragmatic optimism they follow. you can tell that morris likes his characters and he thinks that people can be pretty great when they put in the effort!
(also terrible, sure, but if you had to address humanity as a whole i think these books subscribe more to locke than hobbes)
and it's hard to pull off a tragedy! it's hard to write honestly about terrible things happening while still allowing for hope. it's pretty dang easy to end up writing a tragedy that ultimately misfires and leaves you feeling like humanity sucks
but he didn't do that, this book remains wonderfully humanist
you stuck the landing, four for you gerald morris
no, i'm serious. 4 stars