That is really cool, and now I'm going to look for that.
I ran across Newman's Guinevere trilogy (Guinevere, The Chessboard Queen and Guinevere Evermore) when I was around thirteen, re-read them obsessively throughout my teens, and haven't touched them since about 1992. They're the sort of thing that are so evocative, in my memory, of a particular time and place in my life that I've felt no need to re-read them after that time and place ended.
I recall them as being nightingale-and-roses fantasy with a particularly heavy dose of melodrama, including some very dark violence and rape scenes. I also recall that they were heavily salted with original characters, most of whom I found more interesting than the canon characters, and in hindsight the canon characters also feel a lot like OCs.
I was particularly taken by the wandering scholar-priest who is constantly surrounded by an invisible choir of singers. No one can hear them except him (although on Guinevere's wedding day to Arthur they sing an epithalamium and she can hear that). He's considered both a saint and a madman because he's always waving his hands and talking to people no one can see/hear: essentially he's always in the middle of conducting a choir rehearsal, since the singers can hear him and respond to him as their conductor. Teenage me thought that was particularly awesome.
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That is really cool, and now I'm going to look for that.
I ran across Newman's Guinevere trilogy (Guinevere, The Chessboard Queen and Guinevere Evermore) when I was around thirteen, re-read them obsessively throughout my teens, and haven't touched them since about 1992. They're the sort of thing that are so evocative, in my memory, of a particular time and place in my life that I've felt no need to re-read them after that time and place ended.
I recall them as being nightingale-and-roses fantasy with a particularly heavy dose of melodrama, including some very dark violence and rape scenes. I also recall that they were heavily salted with original characters, most of whom I found more interesting than the canon characters, and in hindsight the canon characters also feel a lot like OCs.
I was particularly taken by the wandering scholar-priest who is constantly surrounded by an invisible choir of singers. No one can hear them except him (although on Guinevere's wedding day to Arthur they sing an epithalamium and she can hear that). He's considered both a saint and a madman because he's always waving his hands and talking to people no one can see/hear: essentially he's always in the middle of conducting a choir rehearsal, since the singers can hear him and respond to him as their conductor. Teenage me thought that was particularly awesome.