The Loathly Lady

Dragons, treachery, and religious dissent shape this busy epic debut. Brandywine, a feckless hedonist who is ill suited to being a squire, is thrust into adventure and intrigue when a dragon wakes to ravage the land of Dagâ Dainâ. With the help of a mysteriously tattooed monk-knight and a prankster prince, Brandywine must save the kingdom he loves by solving the dragon’s riddle—but the answer leads to more questions. Lawson often manages to put a surprising twist on familiar folk tales and Arthuriana, but invented vocabulary (“Brackish bragget and courmi and uinom, Destor’erde chuti-alkahâlis, raki from the xshathras”) clashes with modern turns of phrase (“It was cute and quaint”), and repetitive dialogue and uneven pacing slow the book. Pursuit of the dragon sits uneasily in a narrative that dwells on the minutiae of a joust while also striving to show splintering religious doctrines as motivation for war. Most uncomfortably, a story ostensibly built around the importance of women’s agency consistently represents them as little more than aggregations of physical attributes for Brandywine to enjoy. (Sept.)