When I picked this book for the Once Upon a Time Challenge, I did because I thought it was a King Arthur book. At least, it came up when I searched for “King Arthur” in the library database.

Well, it isn’t.

That’s not exactly true, though. It does take place during the reign of King Arthur, but not the Arthur of myth and legend. It’s set in 500 AD, when most scholars figure that if there was an Arthur, that’s when he lived. Which kind of bummed me out.

Other than that, the book was okay. But, it was missing that… zing?… that would make it really really good. There’s a good strong girl, Ilena, as the main character. But, she spends most of the book confused about her life. Her parents have died, and her dad’s last words were a cryptic message to go to Dun Alyn and find Raymen. Going off of that, Ilena heads out, and meets (of course) with trials along the way. When she does get to Dun Alyn, things are in a state of indecision… the Chief and her daughter were just recently killed. And it’s up to Ilena to figure it all out.

And it sounds like a decent plot, right? And there’s a good twist at the end. And even a bit of romance. But it all falls, well, flat. I don’t care about Ilena and her questions, in fact, I kind of got tired of them way before they were answered. The romance didn’t work, either. It wasn’t there, then, all of a sudden, it was. The only thing that I felt worked was the bad guy, the druid Ogren. He was a good bad guy. (Though he wasn’t really the bad guy, he was working under the instructions of someone else.) And even though Arthur was mentioned, he didn’t really play much of a role at all.

It’s too bad. I was really looking forward to a good King Arthur book.