HENGE

In this YA fantasy novel set in a modern-day Camelot, a 16-year-old Morgan Le Fay vies to become the next king’s magical protector and guide—if she can beat Merlin.
Morgan can’t resist defying her father and entering the televised tryouts for Arthur’s Round, an elite group of Camelot-based magic users that helps protect Great Britain. She also has a secret to hide: Her mother, Morgause, was executed by Mordred, the current King’s Maven (an odd Yiddish term in this Arthurian world). She desperately wants to become Maven herself, and there’s only one tryout per generation. Morgan goes home without a medal after officials discover her fake magic user’s license, but despite this, she finds herself accepted into Arthur’s Round. During nine months of boarding school classes and training, Morgan rubs elbows with Merlin and other figures, such as Guinevere, Vivian and Lancelot, while dodging suspicious outbreaks of fire and flood. As she undergoes various trials of her abilities, she must make sense of her past and decide whom to trust; much more is going on, it would seem, than the teenage narrator realizes. This novel, written in a first-person, present-tense narrative style, uses many other common tropes of YA fiction: a scrappy but painfully self-conscious young heroine with special gifts who’s in danger; a magical boarding school; mean kids and lying adults. The elements of Arthurian legend, too, are familiar. However, Lovejoy (Clan, 2013) mixes up tradition for her own uses, beginning with her daring choice to make the legendary evil sorceress Morgan Le Fay a young, sympathetic hero. Morgan’s adolescent angst, though well accounted for, can become tiresome, and readers may become a little impatient with her tendency to fly off the handle and jump to conclusions. Nonetheless, Lovejoy describes magic with vivid immediacy and updates Camelot well for the 21st century, bringing in political intrigue that makes sense on both mundane and magical levels.
Camelot meets Hogwarts meets Panem in this intriguing, well-written beginning to a planned YA series.