I read Gwen & Art Are Not in Love and here's what I thought

 

Today I’m talking about Gwen & Art Are Not in Love by Lex Croucher, and I picked this up from the Portal Bookshop that lives in the Shambles in York. Shoutout to that shop, it was one of my favourite places to go when I used to live there, but I don’t live there and don’t get to go all that often anymore. Rip.

The blurb is saying that Gwen and Art are not in love, rather inconveniently, however, they are betrothed – and now Art’s been invited to Camelot to prepare for the wedding. It’s going to be a long, hot summer of jousts, feasts and trying not to kill each other. Until Gwen catches Art kissing a stable boy and Art digs up Gwen’s breathless diary entries about the kingdom’s only female knight, Lady Bridget Leclair. Perhaps they’d make better allies than enemies. Maybe it’s worth convincing everyone that they make a disgustingly perfect couple after all. But with Gwen growing closer to Bridget, and Art drawn to Gwen’s brother, Gabriel, the path to true love is looking far from straight.

Now, before I actually talk about the book, this fantasy book had a damn Riverdale reference on page 9. The direct quote is “Not everyone lives for the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of the black and white squares.” That was, I won’t lie, kind of odd to read. I think it’s because I get the reference, but I feel like, if you’re not mentally deranged like I am, then you’ll just think it’s like a tee hee funny line.

The first page tells us there’s a royal tournament happening in Camelot. In the first chapter, Gabe walks in on Gwen while she’s changing, but homeboy doesn’t even realise because he’s got a stack of parchments and doesn’t actually see her, and he gives her a list that is her dowry – since she’s meant to be getting arranged married. Gwen and Gabriel then go to this opening ceremony for the tournament, and this is when Bridget turns up, serving what’s your name, B.o.B, so they calling you Bob. Very impractical for a knight, but if she’s serving, she’s got to serve. There’s also a reminder that Gwen had a dream where she kissed Bridget, slay.

Chapter two hops over to Arthur’s POV, and he’s running away from an inn, you did see in the first chapter there had been rumours of Arthur’s rather scummy exploits across the land. His father ends up hearing, and we learn he was meant to have been at the opening ceremony for the tournament so is then sent to begin his courtship with Gwen. When they get to the castle, Arthur is starving so just immediately goes into the castle in search of a kitchen and ends up running into Gabriel, who is stealing a bunch of marzipan because he’s hungry. That was wild, because why would he just be eating marzipan in the middle of the night? Anyway, then at this party, Gwen and Arthur clearly don’t like each other, but Gwen sneaks out and starts watching Bridget, but catches Arthur kissing this guy, but then he figures out she was watching Bridget.

Arthur was a little shit, especially in the beginning. The bit when he’s got Gwen’s diary and he’s reading it aloud to her, he fully stops part way through to criticise her writing. And on one hand, if he’s that little shit character, I get it, because it’s just how he’d be, but the fact miss Gwen is only seventeen at that point, he’s criticising a child’s writing. Still, I don’t 100% remember the status he had. But he and his father’s family had lost some reputation, although he still had an in with the King, so honestly? Slay I guess. The tea with Arthur was that even though he had that standing, he knew who he was, more or less, or at least, compared to Gwen, but he had to do a lot of sneaking around. You could also see that he was very unhappy with his life, because even with all sneaking around and drinking and debauchery, as the book went on, more of him was uncovered and the reasonings for him doing what he did.

On the other hand, Gwen was such a loser, my god. And I don’t mean that she was a loser just because she didn’t like to go outside and loved reading – I get those bits, personally. She and Arthur were literally the opposites attract – minus both of them being (presumably) gay. She was so tightly wound up, and he managed to start to make her chill out, and she did the opposite for him, where he was, I’ll be real, a mess, and managed to get him together a bit. I think because of her princess status – she doesn’t have her Queencard yet – it meant that she only knew one, pampered, way of life. She goes out with Arthur into Camelot at one point, and she ends up seeing what the real world outside of a castle is like and you see that it gagged her a little bit. You can see that her brother, Gabriel, is almost the same in a sense, even though he knows that he’s going to be king one day, so homeboy there is very repressed about the things he wants. I suppose that is the detail of them both being children of royals, so whatever they want, they’re not really going to have much of a choice in their life.

I appreciated that the whole thing took place within the castle. I’ve said before that I have a very weird relationship with the fantasy/historical genre in that there are only certain facets of fantasy that I enjoy. It’s like how I enjoy Skyrim, I enjoyed Witcher 3, but they had a very specific vibe to them, while being fantasy, and it’s not every fantasy game that I like. I think the bit about this book that I was a fan of was, like I mentioned, was that it all, for the most part, took place in a castle and the surrounding grounds. I think a lot of what sometimes puts me off fantasy is the sheer scale of it. I don’t always want to be reading a whole trilogy for one plot line. But with this all being contained in one location. I say fantasy, it’s more historical than fantasy, but there still are wizards and magic. Still, my point stands that with it being contained in the castle meant that, even when they strayed to different parts, I could still tell where we were, if that makes sense. It never really felt like the place was just names with flimsy feels to them.

Did I understand what was going on all of the time in this book? No, especially when it came to the war part of this book. I say war, it was more of an uprising against the crown, in that someone else wanted to be king. I think, because Gwen was kept away from the important stuff since she was only a princess and Arthur wasn’t royal, it meant that this big looming thing in the book sort of just showed up. It was odd. But at the same time, it wasn’t the main focus of the book, so of course it was going to do that. Arthur and Gwen are meant to get married and they’re both queer and have love interests that they can’t really have, so, weirdly, the uprising isn’t going to be present.

Anyway, this book was fun. It sort of fell into that weird section where I wasn’t bored reading it, but I’ve definitely read other books where I’ve been more into it. Like, I never felt fully committed to the book while I was reading. I don’t know what it was, but there was definitely something missing in it for me. But since I can’t pinpoint what it was, that’s why I’m only mentioning it now, right at the end.

Okay, bye!