I feel vaguely that I ought to post something much more momentous for the annual-ish dusting off of this booklog, but quite simply, I wrote a decent chunk of this in another forum, looked at it, and said, hmm, if I expanded this just a smidge it would be a booklog entry. So:
The Winter Prince, A Coalition of Lions, and The Sunbird are the first three books in Elizabeth E. Wein’s Arthurian/Aksumite Cycle. I’d read The Winter Prince years ago, but never got past the first chapter of Coalition. However, I was told that when the series transitions to Africa, it’s very good, so I somewhat randomly decided to give the whole thing a try again recently.
Like my friend Becca, I forgot a fairly major component of The Winter Prince: “… it’s the incest, the thing I forgot was the incest.” Even by Arthurian standards, there is a lot of it (and that’s not the only kind of abuse by a long shot, be advised). This is an intensely psychological and internal book, told in first-person direct address [*], specifically the Mordred-equivalent telling Morgause about his dramatic experiences with, and highly-conflicted feelings about, his father’s legitimate heir, Lleu. It’s very compellingly done, and if this is your set of tropes, it shall be catnip.
[*] It is not second person, this is the weirdly specific and inconsequential hill I am willing to die on. Everyone says that this, and Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” and Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower (and another series that is possibly a spoiler to name) are in second person, but they are not, all of these stories are one character talking to another character, and that makes the character who’s talking the first-person narrator.
The series has a somewhat weird relationship with the Arthurian mythos, I guess is all I can say without spoilers; in the second book, A Coalition of Lions, it moves to the Aksumite Empire and is narrated by Lleu’s twin sister, Goewin, who apparently has no analogue in the mythos. For years I held this book an enormous grudge because of its first chapter, but this time I powered through. Unfortunately, though I like Goewin very much, I did not enjoy this book; extremely little happens in it, in a frustratingly-claustrophobic way. I’d been advised that this could be regarded as a transitional book, however, so picked up the third.
The Sunbird is the opening of a trilogy, with a new third-person protagonist, Telemakos, and yes, Coalition probably is skippable. The Sunbird is also about attempts to contain a plague, which I did not realize going in. But that was not actually what made me decide to stop reading these books here. Rather, while I know full well that Wein likes to put her characters through the wringer (see: Code Name Verity), and while I know there is a minimum amount of wringer required for characters who are Lymond-analogues, it turns out there is such a thing as too much wringer for me–especially when the character being wrung is not yet twelve years old. It’s well-done wringing! Just not what I’m looking for. So, having confirmed that this continues by skimming the openings of the next two books, I set them aside.