Hello everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today I am reviewing Half Sick of Shadows by Laura Sebastian. Visit the author’s website here. This review has spoilers.
Half Sick of Shadows by Laura Sebastian is a retelling of the poem The Lady of Shalott by Lord Tennyson. I confess, I have never read the poem, which is ironic because I am an avid reader of Arthurian legend. In fact, I started reading when I first picked up the first book of The Pendragon Cycle by Stephen R. Lawhead, and I loved it. So when I first read the synopsis for this book I had to pick it up. Also, I had already read this author’s YA novels and liked them well enough. So, I decided to give this one a try. But unfortunately, this was a no for me. I DNF’d it at 60%. Spoiler alert. I could take that Mordred was not Arthur’s son, that the plot centered on Lancelot’s and Guinevere’s affair, even though I much prefer books about Arthur where Lancelot doesn’t show up at all, and the anachronisms passed me by (mostly; there are a lot of them. Elaine, for example, points out every time she can how scandalous it is to wear a dress without a corset (anachronism: corsets were first invented in the 1550s). She is fixated on this. And she does it so many times, it started to annoy me.) But the final straw for me was Guinevere being a werewolf. This I could not take. This was changing the myth of Arthur too much for my liking and I had to stop. Maybe I’m too much of a classic but this was anathema to me. Especially since there’s absolutely nothing to prepare you for it; not even in the synopsis or title (like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) and I did not care for it. So I did not continue.
I…I do not like Lancelot. It isn’t anything against him, really. I just don’t like that he is always portrayed as this extremely handsome man that women just can’t stop swooning over and falling in love with. So, naturally, he gets around. And every woman he sleeps with is madly in love with him, yet he is not. He stays with that woman for a little bit, decides to break it off with her and then moves on to the next. I don’t like this because it says that being a douchebag is okay. But this is all he is known for: seducing and sleeping with women, including Elaine, the Lady of Shalott, and Guinevere. However, his dalliance with Guinevere is the greatest betrayal. And I get that this betrayal is pivotal for Arthur’s death later on, but I honestly think that Lancelot’s portrayal as the unfaithful man is rather an injustice to him. And that is why I was willing to give this book a chance, but the portrayal of him here is no different and I was expecting that but… Here he is the son of a fay woman and a human man, and he is the most handsome, the most athletic, the most everything (anyone else getting Achilles vibes? It also reminds me a bit of Mark Sloan from Grey’s Anatomy for a more contemporary reference) and of course, the one that (most) women fall in love with. I put the word most in parenthesis here because let’s face it, it’s all women. And Elaine is no exception.
Heartbreak isn’t as lethal as the name implies, you know. Maybe it feels that way at the time, but I swear it isn’t. You’ve seen Gwen and me both rebound from it eventually. I don’t regret anything leading up to it, and I doubt Gwen does either. It’s life, Elaine. Getting hurt, picking yourself up, trying again. You’re so focused on the ending sometimes that I don’t think you know how to appreciate the during.
However, her romance with Lancelot is the main love story in this book. Not his affair with Guinevere, though that one looms large. In this book, Elaine is a seer, and she knows from the beginning that Lancelot is going to betray her with Guinevere, so she does everything in her power not to fall in love with him but fails miserably. Elaine’s vision of Lancelot and Guinevere together is what the entire book revolves around, whilst the whole group—Lancelot, Morgana, Guinevere, and Elaine—are trying to put a young Arthur on the throne. And at times, honestly, it gets boring. The knowledge of Lancelot’s eventual betrayal doesn’t let Elaine live, and she quickly becomes the captive in a tower of her own making (in a similar fashion to her mother). Her whole life, decisions, and actions, revolve around that moment in the future when Lancelot and Guinevere sleep together. And I thought it was rather exhausting at times. Every chapter alternated timelines between Elaine’s memories of the past, her visions in the future and the present as Arthur’s friends are trying to make him a king. I didn’t particularly have a problem with this writing style, but I did find that some chapters relating the past or future got rather long and boring.
And I admit that it’s rare when I find a book where I actually like Guinevere. I almost always never do. And I hate to say it, but this book is not the exception. I did not like Guinevere, and, like I said before, I particularly didn’t like her when I found out she was a werewolf. She was already annoyingly flighty and proud. But I didn’t like this twist at all and did not finish the book after it. Guinevere became utterly insufferable. Arthur is also a character that I think is portrayed rather unjustly. And though he is still young in this book, and his kindheartedness and lust for knowledge is something he is widely known for, I thought he had absolutely no agency in this book. He felt like a cardboard character in the background. He was there, true, but he had to be because he’s Arthur… but he’s just there, you know? I also did not like Merlin. Merlin is and will always be Arthur’s greatest ally, not Mordred’s. So when I read that Merlin was coronating Mordred, I was shocked. Merlin would never do that. Ever.
I gave this book an I Did Not Like It rating.
