text: If you liked Whyte's previous sophomoric efforts, you'll love this.  In addition to being the same dumb, hackneyed story lines and stock characters we are used to from the previous books, this one has the additional feeling of being pure filler:  in no real way does the story get advanced.  Arthur begins as a baby, and ends as a small boy.  There are adventures, but nothing important happens.  As usual, in Whyte's books, the bad guys are left alive so they can sneak up and do new evil, and as usual the bad guys are pure plot devices and in no way characters.  With all the (totally ahistorical) democratic rhetoric, Merlin's brother shows up out of nowhere and they immediately hand him half the power in Camelot.  Anyone who would read this, I guess, has already read the previous lame offerings in this series and doesn't object to laughably boring plots which rely heavily on coincidence, caricatures who never grow or change, and historical detail that sounds like it comes from a museum brochure rather than any real scholarship.  So go for it.  But please, if you want something exciting that will also make you think, look at the really good Arthurian efforts out there--Gillian Brandshaw, A.A. Attanasio, or Barbara Taylor Bradford to name just a very few..
  