Camelot Rising - Kiersten White

Initial Draw: ☆☆☆☆
Character Development: ☆☆☆

Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆☆

Overall: ⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Princess Guinevere has come to Camelot to wed a stranger: the charismatic King Arthur. With magic clawing at the kingdom's borders, the great wizard Merlin conjured a solution - send in Guinevere to be Arthur's wife...and his protector from those who want to see the young king's idyllic city fail. The catch? Guinevere's real name - and her true identity - is a secret. She is a changeling, a girl who has given up everything to protect Camelot.

To keep Arthur safe, Guinevere must navigate a court in which the old - including Arthur's own family - demand things continue as they have been, and the new - those drawn by the dream of Camelot - fight for a better way to live. And always, in the green hearts of forests and the black depths of lakes, magic lies in wait to reclaim the land.

Deadly jousts, duplicitous knights, and forbidden romances are nothing compared to the greatest threat of all: the girl with the long black hair, riding on horseback through the dark woods toward Arthur. Because when your whole existence is a lie, how can you trust even yourself?"

This is a review of the entire trilogy, but I'm only including the synopsis for the first book to avoid spoilers. I've read Kiersten White before, and I find her writing style to be a little...slow, to be succinct. A lot of detail, not so much a lot of action. This was no exception - much like I wrote in my review of And I Darken, "long book for so little to really be happening."

Don't get me wrong, I didn't dislike the series, exactly. The intrigue is interesting, there were moments of excitement, it's just that in between those moments things progressed at truly such a glacial pace. It's a lot of exactly the same thing happening over and over, made more boring by Guinevere Not-Guinevere being kind of dull. I also thought some of the interpersonal drama throughout the series was not very well-developed and didn't make a ton of sense, which makes it a tough read at times when that interpersonal drama is part of what's driving the story forward.

All that said, I did finish the series, so that says something. While overall I think the writing style was aggressively mediocre, the good parts were good enough to want to know what happened. And I thought the last book was slightly better than the first two, so it grew on me.