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    The King Arthur Trilogy Book One: Dragon's Child
    The King Arthur Trilogy Book One: Dragon's Child
    The King Arthur Trilogy Book One: Dragon's Child
    Audiobook18 hours

    The King Arthur Trilogy Book One: Dragon's Child

    Written by M. K. Hume

    Narrated by Steven Crossley

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    We meet Arthur first as a shy, subservient twelve-year-old living in the home of Lord Ector, who took in the boy when he was a babe to protect him from murderous kin. One day, three influential men arrive at Ector' s villa and arrange for Arthur to be taught the skills of the warrior: blade and shield, horse and fire, pain and bravery. When they return years later, the country is in desperate straits, for the great cities of the east are falling to the menace of the Saxon hordes. In spite of Uther, Arthur becomes a war chieftain and wins many battles to earn him the trust of his Celtic warriors and prove that he alone can unite the tribes. But if he is to fulfill his destiny and become the High King, Arthur must find Uther' s crown and sword. The future of Britain is at stake.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateNov 12, 2013
    ISBN9781470381363
    Author

    M. K. Hume

    M. K. Hume is a retired academic. She received her MA and PhD in Arthurian literature and is the author of The Merlin Prophecy, a historical trilogy about the legend of Merlin. She lives in Australia with her husband and two sons.

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    Reviews for The King Arthur Trilogy Book One

    4/5

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    • 2/5
      I honestly can't remember why I DNF'd this book. I'm going to give it another try. I can remember getting a bit irate with the common way the story was being told - like it was following the Disney Sword and the Stone version but without the good writing Disney had? I'll have to try it again to remember.
    • 4/5
      This is a great read, full of action and adventure, about the rise of King Arthur. Since the book ends when Arthur is finally crowned king, I hope this is the start of a series.
    • 5/5
      I've only recently become familiar with some of the famous works surrounding King Arthur. Names like T.H. White, Tennyson's Idylls, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and more were introduced to me during an Arthurian Seminar I took my last semester of school. As I already have a huge love of all things legend and folktale, it is only natural that King Arthur stories would grab my attention and create a sort of monster.Read the rest of this review at The Lost Entwife on Oct. 14, 2013.
    • 5/5
      As usual, this book arrived at my doorstep free of charge. Unusually, I can't determine with any specificity exactly why it did so. If I had to guess I'd say it was the Atria program via Simon and Schuster. Despite that kind and mysterious consideration, my candid and baldfaced opinions appear below.In a nutshell, this is the retelling of the King Author myth spanning from Author's birth through his rise to the kingship. As Authurian legends go, this one tends towards the strictly realistic and pulls no punches about the state of the world at the time.On the positive side, Hume's writing is beyond reproach. I found myself constantly entertained at her use of appropriate and timely language which pulled me to my dictionary repeatedly and with unbridled glee. This is a book that educates while it entertains. Anything she chooses to write in the future will have my utmost attention. Here is a tale that is woven with intricacy and detail that is unrivaled.On the negative side, and this is a negative side that is rather implied by my perceptions of the tastes of other readers, this is not a book that speeds along with any great rapidity. The book goes on for almost 500 pages and while I was entranced by the intricacies, I can imagine other readers finding themselves in the arms of a rather intransigent ennui. The book does move slowly but the arc that it traces is an epic one.In summary, this is a book to approach in an unhurried and open-minded manner. It has much to teach you, not the least of which is vocabulary. It's not a book for a single solitary rainy afternoon but instead one to be taken a few chapters at a time over the course of a week. It is a book to be pondered over and digested slowly. As epic tales go, this is a fresh and delightful retelling but don't expect to swallow it in one go. Take the time to savor and learn from what it has to tell you. I look forward to the subsequent volumes. This is a book for the thinkers among us.
    • 4/5
      Thank you to Atria Books for sending me an advanced copy of Dragon's Child in exchange for an honest review! Originally published in 2009, a new edition of the paperback and ebook will be available later this fall, thus it was provided to me via Atria's latest Galley Alley program. This book first caught my eye when I found out it was an Arthurian fantasy novel written by an expert on the subject. Like many, I've been exposed to my share of retellings and interpretations of the King Arthur mythos in fiction (there are a ton out there!), but I am most definitely not well-versed in the historical details. This made me curious as to how an academic authority on Arthurian literature would tackle the legend.Not surprisingly, the novel turned out to be a story of Arthur (known here as Artorex) and his journey from a humble childhood to become the High King of the Britons. Artorex is presented to us as the reluctant hero, whose personal choice would have been to raise a family on his foster family's farm and live out the rest of his days as a simple steward. Fate, however, has set him on another path.I'll admit that I found it difficult to get into the story at first. The introduction to the hero's journey is a familiar one: the boy who everyone had initially dismissed suddenly discovers that he has a greater destiny. In the next few chapters, his skills are honed and he becomes stronger. He learns to fight, he learns to ride, and he gains all the experiences he will someday need to become a great leader. It was pretty standard, even as Arthurian legends go, and I had to suppress the temptation to skim this section, especially knowing that the real meat of the story had to be just beyond this point.Thankfully, I was right and the book did get better. Much better, in fact, with the introduction of Gallia, Artorex's first wife. That's right, I did a double-take too when I saw that. M.K. Hume herself wrote in her Author's Note explaining that she once came upon an evocative reference in an obscure text named Guinevere as Arthur's second wife, but even though she could find no other material in her research that even hints at a first wife, the idea stuck. And I have to say, the fact whole epic trilogies can develop and evolve from tiny little tidbits like that is what fascinates me about historical fiction, and why I love the genre.In this case, I really enjoyed the author's take on Artorex's childhood and teenage years, as well as her reasoning behind why she chose to tell his story the way she did. A lot of attention is given to these formative years, and I was surprised at how engaging the story became after getting past his boyhood training. Even though Hume used a third person omniscient point of view to narrate the story (which I normally dislike, because it tends to distract me from the main character), the focus always remained on Artorex, making his transformation from the boy known simply as Lump to King Artor of the Britons a very drawn-out but believable one.In the end, I went from feeling luke-warm towards this novel to liking it quite a lot. The writing style can come off as a bit cumbersome at first if you're not used to it, but I later felt it suited the book very well, giving a cold edge to some of the darker and more violent parts of the story. This first book ends with Artorex being crowned the High King, and the best part is knowing there is so much more to his legend, which I'm looking forward to continuing in the rest of this trilogy.