After my first foray into Meg Cabot’s books (‘How to Be Popular’), I was eager to read another one of her novels. Even though ‘Avalon High’ didn’t quite live up to my high expectations, it certainly did a nice job of maintaining intrigue, and had me bent on keeping the pages turning, especially after the first third of the book. This is not to say that the first third was not good, but I just couldn’t get quite as into it as I wanted to, especially after having been so excited about reading another novel by Cabot. Once I started in after the first hundred pages, the story started to fly by.
The plot revolves around Ellie Harrison, a high school girl who has moved to Annapolis, Maryland with her parents, who just so happen to be Arthurian scholars. Coincidences start to abound, from the name of Ellie’s new school being Avalon High, to the names of the people in the popular crowd that she finds herself quickly becoming a part of – Jennifer, Lance, and Marco especially, since their names seem to resemble those of Guenevere, Lancelot, and Mordred, all of Arthurian lore. The guy she finds herself liking – A. Will Wagner – also seems to have similarities with King Arthur, including the way his father is remarried to his former best friend’s wife, and allegedly sent that best friend to his death in a roundabout way.
Soon enough, Ellie finds that people think she is involved in what she can only consider an absurd fantasy about how King Arthur might someday return, reincarnated as someone else. Could any of this be true? Or is Ellie just over-thinking what is going on around her as she attempts to find a way to get Will to like her? Uncertainty and curiosity keep readers on the edges of their seats, wondering if there is some explanation apart from extreme coincidence for all the goings-on around the multitude of seemingly Arthurian characters.
It would have also been nice if Cabot had found a way to wrap up Ellie’s relationships with her friends from the track team. It seemed that once the storyline with Will truly came front and center, these other friends fell into the background and were not really resurrected (pun intended!) as much as they could have been to give proper closure to Ellie’s relationships with them.
Overall, I recommend Meg Cabot as an author who knows how to engage her readers and stimulate their thought processes. I was truly curious how the story would wrap up and what explanations would be given for the coincidental occurrences that were ever-present throughout the story. I guess when coincidences abound, sometimes that means that they may not be coincidences at all!
You can find ‘Avalon High’ by Meg Cabot here: http://amzn.to/1RtPEjN