Jerry Cooke
4.25⭐️ - A magical Arthurian legend retelling that deals with intense grief, ancestral trauma, and the feeling of being an ethnic minority amidst the prejudices in secret societies.
Bree longs to get out of her small town and is excited when she gets offered a place at an early admission residential program at a prestigious college in North Carolina. Soon after she gives the news to her, a car crash takes her mother away from her and throws her internal world in to turmoil. Struggling at first to settle in to the college life and with clues to what happened to her mother leading her in their direction, she negotiates her way into a secret society. What she finds in her time there completely throws into question what she thought she knew about her self and her family.
This is a fascinating take on Arthurian lore and mixes the traditional historical stories with the history of colonialism and slavery in the US. Bree's ancestral connections and the midden magic tied up in this, as well as the erasure and persecution of these natural magic users, talks a lot to the treatment of minorities in the US. A lot of plot is given to the discussion of that experience, of how it feels to be in traditionally low-diversity spaces, and how it takes an immense amount of will to beat down the prejudices you face.
This was a really well done story and I'm looking forward to reading the next two!
4.25⭐️ - A magical Arthurian legend retelling that deals with intense grief, ancestral trauma, and the feeling of being an ethnic minority amidst the prejudices in secret societies.
Bree longs to get out of her small town and is excited when she gets offered a place at an early admission residential program at a prestigious college in North Carolina. Soon after she gives the news to her, a car crash takes her mother away from her and throws her internal world in to turmoil. Struggling at first to settle in to the college life and with clues to what happened to her mother leading her in their direction, she negotiates her way into a secret society. What she finds in her time there completely throws into question what she thought she knew about her self and her family.
This is a fascinating take on Arthurian lore and mixes the traditional historical stories with the history of colonialism and slavery in the US. Bree's ancestral connections and the midden magic tied up in this, as well as the erasure and persecution of these natural magic users, talks a lot to the treatment of minorities in the US. A lot of plot is given to the discussion of that experience, of how it feels to be in traditionally low-diversity spaces, and how it takes an immense amount of will to beat down the prejudices you face.
This was a really well done story and I'm looking forward to reading the next two!