Finally, a 600 page book that earned each and every one of those pages. This book is the story-after-the-story, the tale that's told after the heroes are dead. But what truly makes a hero, anyway? In these pages you will find a story woven of magic and myth, pragmatic concerns and wild quests, and the stories of all our disparite leftover heroes.

Something I wasn't expecting, but perhaps should have been, was the narrative's deep preoccupation with God. Not in a way that betrays any Christianity in the author, but rather in a way reflective of how people in this time period who were Christian would have acted and spoken. God is this real, but incredibly distant force. He is both deeply personal and entirely unconcerned. At every turn God's opinion is sought, yet our protagonists know that that opinion will only be delivered in the most enigmatic of ways, if at all. It's fascinating and enchanting, and watching each character grapple with God in their own ways, and then grapple with his involvement (or lack thereof) in current affairs had me wanting to chew on my ereader. I adore literature that explores relationships to the divine in this way, as someone with religious trauma who nonetheless finds religion/the divine to be something interesting and perhaps important.

Of course God isn't the only mythical force in this book. The old gods are here too, lurking in near-history and memory of those who choose to remember them. And there is always Otherworld and the fairies to be considered. Viewing the Round Table back through the lens of the hindsight of this narrative, one that knows it all falls apart in the end, you see them as hopelessly drawn to the Mythic over and over again, to the exclusion of all else. But kingdoms don't run on adventures, or relics.

This book ALSO tackles questions of generational trauma, and at points that generational trauma ties into the trauma of colonization. This is a Britain before it became a world power; a Britian fairly recently trampled by Rome, then left to the harsh rule of Uther. And several characters in the narrative refuse to let that be elided.

I was a bit nervous picking up this book, once it finally clicked who Lev Grossman was. I found the first Magicians book unreadable because of its sexism and other issues. The tone of the book alone made my skin crawl. That is definitively not true for The Bright Sword. That tone is entirely missing from the narration here. And while there is sexual violence present, it is violence that is present in Arthuriana as it stands (at least as far as I am aware), and I felt it was handled well. 

Overall, this book felt like something between a fairytale and something akin to The Odyssey, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.