Book Review: The Witch, The Sword and The Cursed Knights
The Details
Media Type: Paperback
Title: The Witch, The Sword and The Cursed Knight
Author(s): Alexandria Rogers
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Pages/Length: Hardcover; 432
Release Date: February 8, 2022
Source: Publisher/TBR and Beyond Tours
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
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Twelve-year-old Ellie can’t help that she’s a witch, the most hated member of society. Determined to prove her worth and eschew her heritage, Ellie applies to the Fairy Godmother Academy—her golden ticket to societal acceptance. But Ellie’s dreams are squashed when she receives the dreaded draft letter to serve as a knight of King Arthur’s legendary Round Table. She can get out of the draft—but only if she saves a lost cause.
Enter Caedmon, a boy from Wisconsin struggling with the death of his best friend. He first dismisses the draft as ridiculous; magic can’t possibly exist. But when Merlin’s ancient magic foretells his family’s death if he doesn’t follow through, he travels to the knights’ castle, where he learns of a wicked curse leeching the knights of their power.
To break the curse, Ellie and Caedmon must pass a series of deathly trials and reforge the lost, shattered sword of Excalibur. And unless Ellie accepts her witch magic and Caedmon rises to become the knight he’s meant to be, they will both fail—and the world will fall to the same darkness that brought King Arthur and Camelot to ruin.
The Review
It should be no surprise to anyone that The Witch, the Sword and the Cursed Knights ended up on my reading list. The MG category has some of my favorite stories ever hiding in it, and I’m always happy to read a new Fantasy book that caters to a younger audience. What makes it fun to read these as an adult, is that I get to come at them from the perspective of how I enjoy them now and how I would have enjoyed them as a child. It’s a ton of fun, and I couldn’t wait to drive into this one.
Let’s start with the things I loved, shall we? First off, this book dives straight into a series of magical realms. We see fairy tale characters, creatures from all manner of lore, and there’s a heavy dose of Arthurian history thrown in as well. I appreciated the fact that everything around Ellie and Caedmon was so whimsical. Within the first few chapters they meet so many types of people and beasts, it’s a joy to follow along. Better still, Rogers works hard to show that the things we think we know about these characters may not actually be true. There’s a lot of grey area in the characters here, and I loved that for this book. More grey moral characters in books, please!
Now, that being said, the characters were also the hardest part of this book for me to reconcile. I’m an extremely character driven reader. I want to see my characters learn, grow, and hopefully come out successful on the other side. Ellie and Caedmon had excellent starting points. Ellie’s want to prove herself to her mother (and, truly, to herself) really tugged at my heart. Watching Caedmon try to reconcile the unexpected death of his best friend did the same thing. I understood these two, and I hoped for them to succeed. However, they didn’t seem to expand much beyond that throughout the story. They made it to the 2D phase, but never quite hit that 3D and fully fleshed out point.
The same is true for the side characters, which made things tough. There wasn’t enough difference between them, in terms of personality, to really make them all that memorable. It was more like they were drafted for the moment they were needed, and then cast aside. This made it difficult for any world building to happen, and that broke my heart. I always found myself wanting to know more. More about our cast of characters, more about their world, and much more about their magic! There were so many great lessons for young readers to learn here, but they took a bit of dissecting to get to. I’m not sure if younger me would have been able to pull them out of the chaos that this story becomes after a while.
The ending of this does a lot of heavy lifting, and I actually really enjoyed the latter third of this book. Now that I’ve finished, I think I’d like to see another book set in this world! If we were able to go back, and learn more about everything we traveled through, I would absolutely love that. So this book gets a three-star rating for me! I’ll be interested to see what comes next.
After receiving her master’s degree at City, University of London for her non-fiction book on the romantic mythology of Paris, she acted, modeled, and wrote in Los Angeles. Eventually, she discovered she preferred drizzly days to eternal sunshine, and that she didn’t want anything to divert her time from writing.
Now the Wisconsin native lives in Edinburgh with her husband and dog, in eternal search of excuses to visit Paris.
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