Guinevere's Gift

by Nancy McKenzie

Reviewed by Coral

At thirteen, Guinevere doesn’t believe in the prophecy but knows that it still has power over her life. It was why she was sent from her father’s small kingdom to live with her aunt Alyse – it will provide her with more opportunity to marry a powerful man. It is why Queen Alyse – still harboring resentment for the years she spent as the unfavoured sister to Guinevere’s mother Elen – is determined to ensure her own daughter rises before Guinevere. She also learns that it is the reason that the tribes called the Old Ones protect her.

While her Uncle King Pellinore is away, answering the call of King Arthur to ride to war against the Saxons, livestock begins to go missing from Pellinore’s lands. As Alyse has people looking into this crime, they stumble across truth of a larger plot.

Out of all of the books I’ve read by Nancy McKenzie, this is probably the one I’ve liked best since The Child Queen, mainly because there wasn’t anything really objectionable in this book.

I got a little frustrated when I realized that the story wasn’t going to get to Arthur and Camelot and his knights, because that’s what I’m looking for when I read stories about the Arthurian legend.

I thought that the story was setting itself up to be a new take on the legends, where a character we meet at the beginning would be revealed to be this novel’s take on Lancelot, for example, but by the end of the book it no longer seemed to be going in that direction.

Grade: B