The Winter Prince
Apr. 19th, 2020 06:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alaterdateCame across The Winter Prince by Elizabeth Wein on runpunkrun's April 11th Weekend Update post in the form of this tweet
Hey, you! Are you into cruel, beautiful, tormented, jealous, incestuous princes? Because I just discovered Elizabeth Wein's 1993 Arthurian Mordred retelling called THE WINTER PRINCE, and it's the iddiest thing in id-town. It's THE CRUEL PRINCE, but make it gay and take it to 11
— Shelley Parker-Chan (shelleypchan) April 6, 2020
I have not read The Cruel Prince and I only vaguely have an idea of what it's about (but am most definitely conflating it with other books about... fairies??)
Even so, I remember having slight interest in it when it came out. The words "cruel" and "prince" call out to me, but I have yet to care for fairies. So here's this Mordred "retelling" and my library has it on Overdrive. It's a go 👍
It's only around 200 pages so I just read it in one sitting rn. And I loved it.
[As a heads up on the incest bits, it's nothing more than the Arthurian Legend already had (with Mordred being the son of the brother-sister pair Arthur and Morgan). There are other brief mentions of past occurrences never painted in a good light. & nothing depicted in text beyond a kiss.]
It's a completely character driven book and Medraut is just the kind of character I love. I have incredible love for characters who have EVERY REASON to "turn" on someone who treated/s them like shit, but they desperately try to refrain from being hateful (Kell in the Shades of Magic series & Brutus in the Emperor series come to mind) (I also like it if they do go all vindictive too like Victor in Vicious). Medraut's fraught relationship with his father and half-siblings hit me so hard. I love every agonizing bit. Every time he spoke of how his father loved his brother the most, and every time Lleu was a little shit to him, and every time his family was blatantly suspicious of him despite him having only ever been helpful to them. De-li-ci-ous. I enjoyed the threads of his relationships with everyone in this book. Especially with Goewyn because she was a great character all on her own and I enjoyed how they propped each other up.
Medraut's little moments of sadism that he tried to stifle were so good too.
"Why is it such a great temptation to torment someone who is helpless?" - Medraut
"Your hands are so strong you could crush that delicate creature you hold, but you do not hurt it." - Goewyn to Medraut
I eat that shit up.
The part of this story I would consider the plot starts late in the book, however the characterization that builds up to it is what makes it exquisite. The writing is amazing and the opening page had me shook. I knew right at that moment that I was going to enjoy this. This story was short, but so cathartic for me for some reason; I cried no less than three times. The ending not only satisfied me, the ending hit me in the gut. I don't even know how I expected it to end, but I was honestly so overjoyed. I didn't even care about the unbelievability of some of the character moments around the end because it was so good and so freeing. I started to read the excerpts from the other books in the series, but it was Medraut who reeled me in and since I'm good with the ending I don't think I'll read the rest of them lol.
Also I wouldn't really say it was "gay", even though Medraut's focus is on his brother Lleu it doesn't really come across as an LGBTQ+ story, not even in subtext (and I live for subtext).
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