Cori McCarthy always longed to read a book about “girl King Arthur.” They didn’t know they’d have to write it.
“In fact, it took me this long to write because I figured someone else would do it,” says McCarthy, who was busy writing four other YA novels (Now a Major Motion Picture,etc.), a middle-grade series, and a nonfiction picture book about Arab-American poet Khalil Gibran.
Only in sharing the idea with their partner, YA author Amy Rose Capetta (Unmade, Echo After Echo,The Brilliant Death, etc.), did McCarthy begin to seriously consider the possibility.
“At first, it was just ‘girl King Arthur,’ and then it was ‘girl King Arthur in space,’ ” McCarthy says. “Then one day I looked at [Amy Rose] and said, ‘Merlin ages backward, so he would be a teenager in this....’ And that was the tipping point, where all of a sudden she said, ‘Well, you have to write it.’ And I said, ‘Well, I clearly am not writing it—maybe if you wrote it with me?’ ”
Capetta’s strengths are dialogue, metaphor, and magic; McCarthy’s are plot and structure. Together, they forged a bold, brilliant, funny, edgy epic, Once & Future, starring a queer 17-year-old girl as King Arthur, a questioning 17-year-old boy as Merlin, and their chosen family as the Knights of the Rainbow.
“I fangirled my way into writing this book,” Capetta says. “I loved the idea of having this big adventure that invites so many new people into the canon, a story about heroes and who gets to be one, and I felt immediately I needed to read it. I did not yet know I needed to write it, with Cori. That was a slight surprise.”
Arthur incarnation Ari Helix is surprised to discover a sword sticking out of an oak tree on Old Earth, the ecological preserve where she and her adoptive brother, Kay, crash-land after being pursued by the Mercer Company, a merciless conglomerate that controls most of the galaxy’s resources.
“There were things in this universe that Ari didn’t understand,” they write. “Space travel, for one, the segregation of Ketch for another, herself for the grand finale. But this tree—it needed to be set free. She’d never felt anything so strongly in her whole life, almost like someone was nudging her toward it. Almost as if that someone had been nudging for a lot longer than the last few minutes, and only now were they willing to tip their hand.”
Claiming Excalibur sets in motion the 42nd iteration of the Arthurian cycle: train, conquer, defeat greatest evil in world, unite humankind. But as Merlin soon discovers, Ari isn’t your typical Arthur—which is exactly what makes Once & Future a can’t-miss for fantasy fans:
“All hail this worthier-than-ever, fresh, and affirming reincarnation of the legendary king and her round table of knights, which dazzles with heroic flair, humor, and suspense,” our reviewer writes.
“We’re very excited that this book was welcomed,” McCarthy says. “It was—I don’t want to say a surprise, but we didn’t know if somebody would see it the way we saw it, which was a blockbuster, flashy, fun, and commercial, all on purpose.
“I hope this book makes people feel a little bit less alone,” Capetta adds, “and makes them feel they’ve found people in the pages that maybe they needed to know.”
Megan Labrise is the editor at large and the co-host of the Kirkus podcast, Fully Booked.
