Title: The Witch, the Sword, and the Cursed Knights
Author: Alexandria Rogers
Stars: ★★ (2 stars)
This review is spoiler free!
After reading the blurb, I instantly felt the marketing team wanted to sell this as Wicked meets The Sword in the Stone. As I grew up on Arthurian legend and still can’t resist even the most ridiculous of retellings, I strapped myself in for an exciting ride.
On the whole, it is a story of a young girl coming into her own. The binary of black and white comes into question, but it didn’t always strike a the same note, so while biases were overcome to some degree, the path there was messy. That being said – life is messy.
There’s a thin line between dreamy narratives and purple prose. Rogers walked that line a bit too closely for me at some points. On the whole, I often caught myself thinking about authors who had managed to pull off particular boarding school MG cliches better or whose dialogue flowed without my eyes glazing over as much. There were a few points when forced rhymes left me yearning for the character to point out how ridiculously self-important their elders were.
Overall, it was like tossing stones over a pond. We just skimmed the surface, and the glimpses were intriguing, but the story repeatedly overthrew, hitting the other shore instead of allowing anything to sink in.
Eli Celata 
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