The Return of Sir Percival: Guinevere’s Prayer by S. Alexander O’Keefe

The Return of Sir Percival: Guinevere's Prayer by S. Alexander O'Keefe
Published by Greenleaf Book Group Press on September 6, 2016
Genres: Fantasy, Historical, Mythology
Pages: 376
Format: eBook
Source: NetGalley
Purchase on: Amazon// Barnes & Noble
Add to: Goodreads

I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

rating
one-star

A Tale of the Last Knight of the Round Table
Seven years after the death of Arthur Pendragon, Sir Percival, the last surviving knight of the Round Table, returns to Albion after a long and futile quest for the Holy Grail. The peaceful and prosperous home that he left a decade earlier is no more. Camelot has fallen, and much of the Pendragon’s kingdom has been subjugated by the evil Morgana and the Norse invaders who once served under her banner.
Although the knight desires only to return to his ancestral lands and to live in peace, he vows to pursue one last quest before he rests—to find Guinevere, the Queen of the Britons. This journey will force the knight to travel the length and breadth of Albion, to overcome the most fearsome and cunning of enemies, and to embrace a past that is both painful and magnificent.
The Return of Sir Percival is the tale of a knight who seeks peace, but finds only war, of a Queen who has borne sorrow and defeat, but who will not yield, and of a valiant people determined to cast of the yoke of their oppressors. It is also a tale of tragedy and triumph, and of romance lost and then found. 
The unique vision of the Arthurian world brought to life in S. Alexander O’Keefe’s The Return of Sir Percival takes readers on a journey that is as enthralling as it is memorable.

Review

With such a gorgeous cover and an intriguing synopsis, I was so excited to start The Return of Sir Percival by S Alexander O’Keefe. Yet, when I started, all I wanted to do was put it down and never pick it up again. Sadly, I could not get into it at all and found myself wishing I hadn’t started it, or hadn’t needed to finish it.

The largest problem is the pacing of the story, which is all over the place. It drags and is slow for the most part and then suddenly spikes with a fight or any kind of action, only to fall back to a near standstill. Telling and not showing is the main contributing factor to this slow pace. The majority of the novel is simply characters telling other characters about things that happened. Telling characters about battles, telling characters about feelings, telling characters about escapes, etc. Reading an entire story about people telling each other about these things instead of showing the reader these important pieces of information is such a misstep.

The writing was dry, the dialogue burdensome, and the characters lacked any depth or complexity, all of which could have made up for the terrible pacing but didn’t. The Return of Sir Percival by S Alexander O’Keefe was a slow read that ultimately felt like listening to someone who read a book but was retelling it without any form of enthusiasm.

one-star

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