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3.5 stars

For being 670 pages long, it was overall very readable, especially the first half. The beginning part of the book was very immersive, and it was fun to see how Grossman was constructing his version of the era of Camelot, and it was also fun getting to meet many of the characters and getting to know their backstories. However, there is a point in the story where the character the book largely follows, Collum, is on a quest that turns into a series of quests that seem to go nowhere and he feels trapped in the act of interminable questing - it's kind of how I felt about that last third of the book.

Grossman is impressively good at generating lots of plot as well as incredible fantastical situations and images - his inventiveness is really amazing. But there was just too much of it, and it became a bit repetitive. For example, Collum gets into many perilous situations and has the thought "ok I am going to die now" multiple times and at some point it all becomes very Marvel movie and the stakes of life and death get sort of dull. Similarly, there was too much repetition of Collum wondering if he was special and then being shown he's not special...or is he? No he isn't...but is he???

Collum and the other knights seem to care about the idea of Britain, or a certain version of Britain, and their actions are a result of this zeal. As a reader, it was difficult to buy into and share this vision, and of course looking back from this time and knowing the outcome, it all feels pretty existentially pointless. So going along with their endless quests became increasingly difficult for me to care about. As I was reading I was thinking, okay, maybe this is a point about empires falling apart (hello America in 2025) or about how national identity has to change as the peoples within a nation change and how change is just what life is. And then Grossman did the thing that Jess (hi, Jess!) hates where in the last chapters he basically spells this all out and it becomes sort of a clumsy essay about how there will always be immigrants and that there is no such thing as national purity and a vague reference to how indigenous peoples were there first etc

Finally... the ending... (view spoiler)[After following Collum for 665 pages, the very last tiny chapter is about how Dinadan goes on a trip to the East and how he is the last living knight of the Round Table and how he has traveled so far that no one has even heard of Camelot or King Arthur. And then Dinadan dies. And we never find out what happened to Collum, who presumably is also dead. I guess the point is that even people who are central to a national story or a literal story are just side characters in the end? I mean, per Jess hating literal stuff again, the character Constantine literally says that he's going to make himself the hero of his own story. None of this feels profound or interesting in the end. (hide spoiler)]