“The Lost Queen”, by Signe Pike – Let This Be A Warning ⭐️⭐️☆☆☆

(On hearing that the second book in the planned Lost Queen trilogy, The Forgotten Kingdom, was due to be released in September, I felt that I owed it to the reading public to revisit my review of the first book, The Lost Queen, from January 2019—as a warning.)

A former acquisitions editor at Random House and Penguin before leaving to write her first book, Faery Tale: One Woman’s Search for Enchantment in a Modern World, Signe Pike has, in The Lost Queen, intertwined a storyline with a vague connection to Arthurian legend with a teenage girl’s romantic fantasy of a mystical Celtic queen.

The Lost Queen has been compared to both the Outlander saga and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, and is supposedly based on historical information positing a 6th-century Brythonic poet/sage who is the basis for the Merlin character of Arthurian legend and the misty legend of a near-mythical queen of the same era. Unfortunately, the book bears a stronger resemblance to the bodice-ripping romantic fantasy of Outlander (though without the historical accuracy and context) than it does to Bradley’s far superior distaff retelling of the Arthur legend.

We first meet the book’s protagonist, Llanguoreth, as a 10-year-old girl, the daughter of a minor British noble/chieftain in the border lands between modern Scotland and England. She is a fraternal twin, whose brother, Lailoken, will be trained as a “Secret Keeper”—sort of a Druid priest/healer. The girl wishes that she could also become a Secret Keeper, but despite the fact that her mother, now dead, had been one, she is told that it is not possible for her to follow that path; that she must play the part of a chieftain's daughter, marrying well and cementing an alliance. This is the first of many deus ex machina logical inconsistencies which plague this book.

The story follows a cliché-ridden path from the outset, with a cast of vicious invaders (the Angles, a Saxon people from the Continent), valiant Brythonic defenders (the “Dragon Warriors”, led by the “Pendragon”), a corrupt and cruel High King with two sons – one a vicious, wife-beating brute, the other a gentler soul who is (of course) second in line for the throne; and last but not least, the incursive Christians, led by a scheming and corrupt priest who seeks to overturn the Old Religion.

I had to force myself to finish reading this book, led on by both a hope that it would get better and a morbid fascination with the trite narrative. My reward for my persistence was a quickly wrapped-up storyline which seemed to have been designed to lead into the second of a planned three books in the series, and a change in direction, with an indication that the Lailoken proto-Merlin character, not Llanguoreth, was the real main character. This is a disorienting shift in emphasis, and the type of woeful error which a good editor should have corrected. Persisting to the end of the book was a slog due to the florid prose, which cries out for a strict copy editor with a handful of red pencils; if some of the more R-rated sequences were cut or tamed down, this book would slot right in with the more flowery sort of YA novel.

The Lost Queen gave me the sense that Ms Pike, a Com Studies major in college with (apparently) a Celtic mysticism fetish but little grounding in literature (despite her background in the publishing industry), spends her days awash in daydreams of flame-haired Celtic princesses, mystical sages, and handsome Brythonic warriors. I’d bet that she has ALL of the “Celtic Women” CDs.