Kiersten White’s The Camelot Betrayal gives us a Guinevere for a new era

The second installment in Kiersten White’s Camelot Rising series, The Camelot Betrayal reimagines Guinevere as a complex woman with divided loyalties.

Kiersten White’s Camelot Rising series is a refreshingly feminist new spin on the world of Arthurian legend, centered around one of the tale’s most problematic and frequently least understood characters, Queen Guinevere.

In the stories most of us know, Guinevere is remembered almost solely for the scandalous affair that ruins her marriage and breaks her kingdom, and rarely is her character granted much in the way of interiority or even agency in her own choices in that matter.

In White’s series, that couldn’t be further from the truth.  Here, the story is centered on Guinevere, a heroine with serious magical abilities, dangerous secrets, and a mission of her own – to help protect both Arthur and Camelot.

The story began with The Guinevere Deception, a novel that saw a false, changeling Guinevere arrive in Camelot on the orders of Merlin to take over a stranger’s life. Together, she and Arthur are meant to protect Camelot from the threat of the magical Dark Queen, even as they can both never let the world know that Guinevere isn’t really who she’s pretending to be. Along the way, they’ll have to figure out who they are to one another and who else they can trust.

The Camelot Betrayal continues the story, as Guinevere attempts to make a real place for herself in Camelot. She may have made a definitive choice – between magic and mortality, between fighting for her home as a witch or as a queen – at the end of the last novel, but living with that choice is harder than she could have ever imagined.

This is clearly the second novel in a trilogy and often feels like it from a narrative perspective. But that doesn’t mean that it’s boring. Far from it in fact. For being in the middle of things, this is still a novel that feels quite propulsive.

There’s a lot of Guinevere waffling about things, as she tries to decide where she belongs in the world and who she wants to be. Part of her problem is that she can’t remember who she was before she became Guinevere, and though she’s doing her best to make a new life in Camelot, she’s struggling to get passed all the lies Merlin told and all the secrets she doesn’t know about herself. All she wants are answers, but she can’t even tell most of the people around her the questions she has.

As heroines go, Guinevere is still both likeable and painfully human. She just wants to belong somewhere, and to understand her place in the world. She’s still desperate to prove herself – as an asset, as a partner to Arthur, as a ruler in her own right – and validate everything that was done to bring her to Camelot, from the erasure of her own memories to her taking over a stranger’s life. Yet, she’s also still both rushed and rash – frequently jumping to the sort of grandiose conclusions that tend to leave various forms of destruction in their wake. This is a book that’s full of consequences, and though Guinevere herself is in a position that means she herself might not always have to pay the price of her actions, her grief over the things that are done for her and as a result of her choices is complicated and compelling.

Her interpersonal relationships are richer and more complicated in this installment, from her evolving connection with Arthur, to her gossipy connection with Dindrane, to the ways her friendship with Brangien evolves and shifts when Isolde’s presence becomes a greater part of the story.

But one of White’s bests twist in this series remains the fact that she made her Lancelot a woman – a scrapper fighting her way to knighthood in a world that never would have accepted her without a deception that was, at least initially, equal to her mistress’. That The Camelot Betrayal doesn’t make things easy for Lancelot – stuck in a no-man’s land where she is a knight like any other, but never like any other –  is an honest, if unexpected, twist.

Plus, the deep and genuine friendship that develops between Guinevere and and Lancelot is wonderfully rich and layered, probably the best in the series thus far, and it’s a beautiful twist on the way we have been conditioned to normally think of this relationship. (Though, if you do ship them here, I can still see why.)

The Camelot Betrayal is a solid follow up to the first novel in this trilogy and its very surprising and unexpected ending will likely leave readers desperate to know when the next novel – now titled The Excalibur Curse will hit shelves. Sadly, not for a while. But it sure seems like it will be worth the wait.

The Camelot Betrayal is available now. Let us know if you plan to add it to your TBR pile!