It is incredibly difficult to carry a reader's interest through a nearly 900 page novel...and Marion Zimmer Bradly does no better than most.

I was fascinated by the perspective of this novel from the first page. It is essentially a retelling of the Arthur legend from the female perspective, giving all of the characters an entirely new slant. This was much appreciated, but when you have nothing to say, can only carry a book so far. What might have been great plot was far too often distracted by meaningless liaisons, and a redundancy that was maddenning.

My biggest beef with MZB was an odd marriage of repetiveness and inconsistency. She could not seem to decide whether her characters were beautiful or homely, aged or perpetually youthful, strident or shrinking, gay or straight. Her most consistent character was Gwenhwyfar, and by the end of the novel the imagined whine of her voice in my head was enough to cause me to skip passages at a time. This coupled with MZB's propensity to repeat facts and re-introduce a well-hashed conflict repeatedly left me frustrated with both her structure and style. I do not need to be reminded eighty-seven times during the course of your novel that Lancelet is handsome, dark, slender, and athletic. I get it. Her almost obsessive reminders about the conflicts between the belief systems of Christianity and those of Avalon were maddening. In spite of her seeming sympathy to the pagan perspective, she could not seem to consistently yet compassionately portray the religion. It goes from being a faith of torturous duty to pure pleasure, absolute asceticism to hedonism, a haughty disdain for any symbolic object to a death threat when holy relics are stolen from the isle of Avalon. Essentialy, MZB could not seem to get her story straight, and she didn't have enough story to fill 900 pages to begin with, so it can hardly be expected that one would write a truly significant novel with that level of inconsistency.