It's all well and good to have your queer self discovery as bildungsroman, the isolated youth as fantastical fae, your phallic swords (our lesbian lead rejecting the sword), your mystical gays afraid to 'enter' (psychologically) each other for fears their bond is 'unclean', your women overcome with magical trauma, rejecting a patriarchal super-structure that will again smother their personhood and soul. But some of the magic of, say, the comparing guns scene in Red River is that they aren't literally holding their dicks in their hands. There is too much (metaphorical) dick-holding for me to feel strongly about this as a re-interpretation. I liked this book quite a bit more than most (all of what I've directly sampled) of the mainstream 'Romantasy' it, unfortunately, loosely resembles. It's intellectually grounded and rigorous in approach, it sandwiches a particularly gnarly tendon-severing scene that kicks the story properly into gear, and the language (once it's coughed up some hairball dialogue in the first third) has some real arrest and poetry. That said, I can't help but feel that if you tick enough clever-clogs boxes, you start to write homework. It is academic to a fault; you don't need Google to know this author has a PhD and an encyclopedic knowledge of the millennia of rewrites and adaptations of Arthurian legend. It feels like, for a scholar whom I know could reach far deeper, an attempt to smash as many of their intellectual preoccupations as possible into a piece of easy entertainment. I am easily entertained, so I enjoyed myself, but if you don't have some controlling interest in the themes or the setting, I don't know what you'd get out of it. Maybe you, like Griffith, desperately want to fuck the lady of the lake. In that case, should be at the top of your wishlist this holiday season.