The first book in the Camelot Code series, The Once and Future Geek , mixed time travel between the medieval world of King Arthur and our own, and it is a very entertaining book. The second book in the series, Geeks and Holy Grail (Hyperion, October 2019), is also entertaining (though not quite as funny; King Arthur as a modern day high school student is hard to beat....). When Morgana, sworn enemy of King Arthur, attacks the druids of Avalon, Nimue, the youngest of them, takes the Holy Grail and runs with it. King Arthur is dying, and only the Grail can save him. Desperate to keep it from falling into Morgana's hands, she stumbles into Merlin's Crystal Cave. But instead of Merlin there to help her (he's on vacation in Los Vegas, in our time), there's only his very inexperienced apprentice, Emrys. His attempt to hide the grail works, in a sense--as a small, flatulent dragon, it sure doesn't look much like a grail. But it isn't much use to Arthur as a...
by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes Vance is a quetzal shapeshifter who lives with the vampires of Midnight in the 19th century. He has had everything he could want, but when a man visits the vampires and speaks with Vance, his dreamlike life starts to crack as Vance begins to question the actions of his beloved guardians and rulers of Midnight. Vance has good conflicts, and even when he starts doubting, the vampires don’t change their characters. The consistency is nice because it makes it harder for Vance and easier for the reader to understand him. I did not like Vance as a character, though, and I felt that a lot of his thoughts and doubts were forced. He would arrive at a state of mind suddenly and then sit there for a while instead of gradually coming to realizations, and, given what happened to him throughout the book, I’m not sure Vance really would have gotten to where he ended up mentally at the end. Th...
