I’ve not felt very festive this December. I always look forward to this time of year- to the decorations, the special foods we make, the cold and snow we usually have, and the general cheer in the air (assuming we remember not to take things too seriously). But between being busy with work and being sick with a cold all last week, I haven’t had the time or the energy for holiday festivities. Now that I’m recovering, though, I’m starting to catch up with everything I’d left by the wayside. There were so many things to get caught up with. I feel like I’m only halfway there.
I started wrapping presents this weekend. I decided I wanted to make them pretty, so I got out my crafting supplies and went to town. One of the things I have not been keeping up with is reading. Not at my usual pace, anyway. Most weeks, I’ll be in the middle of three or four books and finish at least two. Not this month. I’ve slowed down a lot, and I go back and forth between being perfectly fine with that and being thoroughly annoyed. On one hand, it’s normal to slow down during the darker part of the year. On the other hand, I have a lot of books I’m looking forward to reading, and slowing down means I won’t get to them as soon as I would like. Two books I’ve finished this month include Signe Pike’s The Shadowed Land, which is the latest installment in her Arthurian-inspired historical fantasy trilogy, and Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, which I read as part of the WolfCrawl readalong hosted by Simon at Footnotes and Tangents. I’ll write more about the WolfCrawl experience later on. For now, I’ll discuss The Shadowed Land, a book I’d been looking forward to since I read the previous book in the series, The Forgotten Kingdom. I finished it over a week ago, and I’m still ambivalent about it.
The Shadowed Land The Lost Queen series is based on both Arthurian legend and British history. I haven’t made an intense study of sixth-century Britain, so I can’t judge whether Pike’s rendition of the period is accurate or not. Given that there is very real magic in her world, though, I’m not as inclined to be picky about accuracy. At the very least, these books feel grounded in reality and contain the sort of richness I would expect of a story set in a multicultural area where kings and warlords vied against each other for power and resources, and new religions clashed with old. The characters are vibrant and belong to their time, and the main female character, Langoureth, chafes against the expectations her society has for women without feeling like she’s a twenty-first-century girlboss railing against the patriarchy by shouting that she’s not like other girls. Langoureth is a richly developed character, and her development from book to book feels true and makes sense, given what she goes through. The other characters are almost as well-developed, though there are points where a side character seems to only be hitting the same handful of notes every time. Still, with a cast as large as The Lost Queen’s has grown to be, it’s difficult to develop every character to their fullest extent. I plowed through each of the first two books of this series- The Lost Queen and The Forgotten Kingdom. I was entranced by the story and enjoyed how Pike combined history with legend to create a fascinating narrative she conveyed with lyrical and atmospheric prose, but when I heard no news regarding the third book for some four years, I wondered if there would be a third book at all. Imagine my delight when The Shadowed Land appeared in my bookish circles. I asked for and was granted an advance copy, and jumped right in when I received it. The prose, atmosphere, and politics were everything I expected- richly developed, and not falling for the notion that early medieval people in northern and western Britain must have been dirty, uneducated, and scraping a meager living from rocks. The people of Pike’s world are as complex and cultured as any you might find in continental Europe. Pike doesn’t use the tired excuse of “the mists of history” to either over-romanticize the period or make it dirty and brutal because they don’t have the printing press. That said, I am ambivalent about the developments of The Shadowed Land. In the first two books, our main character is Langoureth, a young woman of one royal house who marries into another royal house to shore up political alliances as the growing Saxon incursions threaten to destabilize all of Britain. Langoureth is a passionate and intelligent woman who agrees to this marriage, even though it destroys her dreams of studying magic and healing, the way her twin brother Lailoken does. Still, Langoureth finds ways to defend her faith and her people as she bears and raises children of her own. But in The Shadowed Land, Langoureth becomes a secondary character in her own story. And sure, the story is growing to become a multigenerational saga, but as Langoureth was the anchor to the first two books in the series, it is a shame that she feels so sidelined in this installment. She is but one of five viewpoint characters now, and instead of affecting the course of events, it often seems as though she is there to establish where certain characters are so they don’t come out of nowhere later in the story. She has lost that fire she had in the first installments- to the detriment of the story as a whole. There is a chance for Langoureth’s redemption, however. Though it’s not listed on the publisher’s or author’s website, a post on Pike’s Instagram feed states that The Shadowed Land will have a follow-up due out in autumn 2027. So I’ll have plenty of time to reread the series and see how The Shadowed Land lands for me upon rereading. For now, my feelings about The Shadowed Land are mixed. I enjoyed my time in this version of historical Britain and I want to see how the characters’ stories turned out, but I was also underwhelmed by two of the viewpoint characters’ narratives and spent a lot of my time with them wondering why they were there in the first place. But I’m invested enough that I want to see if Langoureth gets her fire back, and what that prophecy meant for Artur. It’s a long wait until autumn 2027, but I’m looking forward to finding out what happens next. - Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for a free ebook in exchange for an honest review. This did not affect my opinion. Traveling in Books is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Traveling in Books that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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Sunday, 22 December 2024
Catching Up, and The Shadowed Land
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