Eight Arms Reading Room

Read: The Lyonesse Trilogy -- Sierra Simone

This is an M/M/F contemporary mythology retelling trilogy by my queen, Sierra Simone. I won't paste the blurbs for all three books here because tbf, it's only the third book that I finished somewhat recently. I do want to go back and reread the whole series from the beginning.

Sierra Simone also wrote the New Camelot series (American Queen, American Prince, and American King), which is the Arthurian legend retold with the King Arthur figure as the President of the United States, Guinevere as the First Lady, and Lancelot as the Vice President. Add in a more-than-healthy dollop of kink (and the fact that the series was published in 2016 and 2017 before the orange buffoon who's our current president completely eviscerated whatever was good and noble about that role) and you've got one of my favorite series of all time.

The Lyonesse trilogy retells the legend of Tristan and Isolde, except again contemporary and here where King Mark (Isolde's husband and Tristan's uncle) is the 'king' of a kink club in Washington, DC that trades in the secrets of the wealthy and powerful. (Also, Mark trained President Colchester how to be a Dom to his First Lady and Vice President.)

Add in that the Isolde in this series is a devout Catholic trained by her bishop uncle to be an assassin for God and the Church (!!) and that the series starts (for a change) with the M/M relationship and my love for it approaches the New Camelot series. I think I probably like books 1 and 3 best (mostly because I like the m/m scenes better than the m/f scenes).

I do quibble a bit with the age of the heroines in both series. Greer is in her twenties, I think, when she marries President Colchester, but she meets and falls in love with him when she's 16. Isolde is 19 when she meets Mark and is engaged to him at her uncle's insistence. They're both...very young and the age gaps are very large, which is consistent with the legends, I guess? But then again, lbr, if these women were in their thirties, they would absolutely not put up with their men's bullshit so there'd be none of the plots in these books.

Do you also enjoy reading fictional relationships that would absolutely be way too inappropriate in real life?