Good adventure story, made up tales about a real myth. ( )

I couldn't get into this book. The writing style keeps you at a distance instead of putting you in the action. For example,the narrator is describing the castle, and then says that it is mostly falling down now, and that it is nice to lay on one of the exposed floors and watch the sky while tourists walk around below.

The author's writing style just didn't work for me,I had to put this book down and move on. ( )

I'm slowly making it through some of the dustier tomes in our book room, and this is one that hasn't been taught for years, if ever. I'm reading this after H is for Hawk, as I was intrigued by some of the White biography that Macdonald embeds in her own memoir.

Alas, there's not much about falconry in this story of Arthur "Wart" Pendragon, his trusty mentor Merlyn, and the court dramas including Sirs Gawaine and Lancelot, and Lady Guenevere. The underlying message is mainly about England's embryonic emergence from tribal feudalism to the Arthurian civil society, with the ideal of justice and goodness enforced by the Knights of the Round Table. There is an acknowledgement of human failings - we are naturally weak, selfish, capricious and warlike, and that even the best among us (Lancelot) is a sinner and a liar. And that history is cyclical, and periods of peace and justice are always punctuated by war and dissolution. ( )

This was required reading when I was in high school, and it became one of my favorite books. Now that I am re-reading it as an adult, I forgot how hard it was to get through some of the parts of these stories and am now realizing that it has some themes in it that probably were not appropriate for high school kids.

Book 1: The Sword in the Stone - If you have seen the Disney movie of the same name, it kept most of the main parts of the book, but not all. Merlyn does not have a magical face-off with his female nemesis. This book was hands-down the hardest of the four to get through. There was a lot of description about birds and fish and their habitats and traits, etc...this can be very boring. The Sword in the Stone is the story of Arthur as a child, before he knew he was of royal descent, when he was called Wart. By the end of the story, everyone has found out who he truly is, and that's when we transition to...

Book 2: The Queen of Air and Darkness - This is mostly the story of the Orkney clan (Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris, and Gareth), the children of Morgause. It is mostly the story of them as children/teenagers, and how they get to the Round Table. The book goes from chapters on the Orkeny's to chapters about Arthur and Court. This book was a much faster read than Sword.

Book 3: The Ill-Made Knight - This is mostly the story of Lancelot and his love for both Arthur and Guenevere. Again, the chapters go back and forth between different characters, but for the most part it is about Lancelot. It tells how he fell in love with Arthur as a child, when Arthur told him about the Round Table and Knights that he wanted to create, and how Lancelot then made it his goal to be the best Knight of the Round Table. This was my favorite book of the four.

Book 4: The Candle in the Wind - This is the story about the fall of the Round Table, the Knights, of Lancelot and Guenevere, and the end of King Arthur's reign. I did not remember the end of this book from when I read it 20 years ago, even though I've always been fascinated with Arthur. This book was a relatively quick read compared to a couple of the others.

I will say that I had a habit of falling asleep during reading this book. I think it was partly because I was tired, partly because now that I'm a little older the act of reading actually puts me to sleep, and in some places it was just that the story was slow moving. There is a lot of extraneous description that I didn't necessarily need, but had to get through to get to the good stuff. I guess that's the way people wrote back then. I do, however, still highly recommend this book to anyone who is even a little bit interested in King Arthur, the Round Table, historic novels, or who just thinks that this book sounds relatively interesting. To put my opinion in perspective, I had to force myself to read Twilight because I thought it was the most boring book ever until about 300 pages in. So please, take my opinion of it being a slow read with a grain of salt because everyone has their own ideas of what makes a great story.

I highly recommend this to young and old, or to people who read it as a child and are now adults. You will definitely see it from a completely different view. ( )

3.5*

While I still loved the first book "The Sword in the Stone" (4.5* for that one in this audiobook edition), each succeeding book was less enjoyable and the final book "The Book of Merlin" was just a vehicle for White to expound his own philosophical ideas about why men fight wars and how, if possible, to prevent it. I had never read this 5th book of the series (it wasn't in my old paperback edition of "The Once and Future King") and while I liked the return of Arthur's adventures in the animal world, Merlin and his 'council' were tedious. ( )