CAMELOT & VINE

Burchard offers a modern take on the Arthurian legend in which a struggling Los Angeles–based actor finds herself in the court of Camelot.

It’s the year 2000, and Cassandra “Casey” Clemens, who’s about to turn 40, is dealing with a lot of bad news. First, she discovers that she’s being fired from her gig as the star of a series of cleaning product ads; then, when she tries to surprise her married boyfriend at the airport, she sees that his pregnant wife is already there. When she gets a moment alone with him, Casey decides to salvage some of her dignity by pretending she’s at the airport not to meet him but to fly to London for a new acting job. So off to London she goes, headed to a small town called Small Common, where she hopes to have zero human contact and recover at her leisure. However, after a freak horse-riding accident, she has a strange encounter with an even stranger man holding a bloody sword. Then she notices dead bodies around her, and it soon becomes clear that this isn’t Hollywood make-believe: She’s somehow been sent to Arthurian times. Now these odd soldiers have her in chains and a clear command to bring her to their king; it turns out that she’s a very important person in this time and place. Over the course of this novel, Burchard spins a fun fantasy tale. Narrator Casey has a narrative voice that’s sometimes laugh-out-loud funny (“Running away from everything I knew wasn’t the smartest thing I’d ever done, but it wasn’t the dumbest, either”), and the story in which she finds herself balances humor and action in a way that flows naturally. Casey is portrayed as just flawed enough to be relatable, and even in Arthurian times, she still reads as a real person that one would like to know. The supporting cast, both in modern and olden times, effectively allows Casey to shine more brightly.

An enjoyable and enticing page-turner.