Review: Merlin's Mirror

Merlin's Mirror by Andre Norton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Because the Arthurian legend is so well known and so established, we know more or less what's ultimately going to happen, but Norton makes the journey there interesting and unpredictable. It lacks any lightheartedness, which I miss, but that's not what she's going for. It's also told in a slightly elevated style, fortunately not as bad as some (looking at you, Vance), but just a bit distancing nonetheless.

It's presented as science fantasy. That aspect didn't quite work for me, because the effects are fantasy even where the causes are science (ancient aliens). While it does raise the stakes, it challenged my suspension of disbelief.

It needs more careful editing for scan errors. Mostly, these are full stops missing off the ends of sentences (and occasionally quotation marks, but that might have been in the original; it's a common fault). Sometimes, though, a word has been misread, and at least a couple of them looked as if spellcheck should have caught them. It's not anything like as bad as another Norton book I had from Open Road, though, which made me wary of their books for some time.

Still, when your business is reissuing old books, and scanning is the way you usually do that, you'd think that your editors would be better at fixing the inevitable errors than this example shows to be the case.

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