“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 resembla...