100 books like Avalon High

Stories of people with personal connections to times long gone and places far away always fascinate me. In this novel, 13-year-old Willow begins experiencing strange visions that lead her to believe that she led a former life in ancient Egypt. I love how the author doesn’t shy away from sensitive subjects like religion and terminal illness, but handles them with sensitivity (Willow’s best friend is a fundamentalist Christian who does not approve of the idea of past lives, and Willow’s sister is gravely ill). Still, the main focus of the story is Willow’s research into the possibility of reincarnation, and I found it captivating. 

I am an optimist, and I believe in true love, and I believe things can work for the best even when times seem bleak. So I enjoyed this book, which starts with cave-dwellers and follows their two souls from prehistory to the present. Again and again, though separated by death, these teens search for each other. I love how they find each other again and again, and I appreciate the wonderful message that love is stronger than death.  

I’ve always had an interest in the Salem Witch Trials. So Gallows Hills is a spine-tingling novel that ticks a lot of boxes for me! 17-year-old Sarah moves to a new town and is asked to be a fortune teller at a local fair. When her fortunes start coming true, people question her. Is she a witch? Then she starts having visions that link her to a time and place long ago. I love the idea that our past is always with us, and that we are doomed to repeat the past until we can deal with it!

This is another tale that starts with a fortune-teller—but this time it’s teenage Jo who gets her future told. The clairvoyant tells her that there is only one true love for her—but the last time Jo saw him was in a past life! Now she needs to find him in this life. Jo doesn’t believe a word of this, but events start to unsettle her. Could reincarnation possibly be true? But what if she can’t recognize her soul-mate when she finds him again in this life? I love the suspense elements in this book as well as the romance.

I read this book so many years ago, but it has stayed with me. It struck me then, as it does now, as revolutionary in that it was one of the first retellings of the Arthurian myth from the female perspective.

I took a class on Arthurian Literature in university, and the tales of the period are obviously male-dominated. But The Mists of Avalon showed me a way into the female characters in the tale, and they are fascinating.

Green’s book is a great read, very scholarly, and inclusive of a great deal of comparatively early source material on Arthur. If you want a good discussion of how you could go from a figure of Celtic myth to one of history, again and again in multiple stories, this is the best guide to that journey and deserves a hearing, whether ultimately you agree with it or not. You’ll probably not be surprised to hear that I am not persuaded, despite my considerable respect for the arguments made herein, largely for the same reasons as I noted in looking at Padel’s work above. It is extraordinarily difficult to determine whether Arthur passed from ‘history’ to folk-lore or folk-lore to ‘history’, better in my view to not distinguish these as two separate genres with this much clarity.

As usual, it all comes down to the Historia Brittonum, which is called… show more.

Even richer than the tradition of Arthurian films are musical adaptations of King Arthur, stretching back, at least, to the seventeenth century. As it says on the lid, this book explores how King Arthur has been approached in the wide realm of music. I love operas, musicals, and orchestral music, and Arthur is a consistent subject and theme.

Whether Camelot or Spamalot, putting Arthur’s story on stage or to music brings out aspects of his story that words or images alone cannot, and the musical Arthurs are some of the most nuanced versions of the man. I’ve returned to this book and the works it explores many times–often writing about Arthur myself while listening to music about him or featuring him.  

Arthur Rex tells the same story as Le Morte D’Arthur, but in a radically different way. Where Mallory idolizes the knights and nobles of Arthur’s court, Thomas Berger paints them in the most unflattering light possible. Everyone is a cretin, a sex maniac, or both, and their backwards morals are used as clever mirrors of our own modern moral failings. Arthur Rex is probably the funniest version of the Arthurian Legend that I’ve read. It’s got its tongue firmly lodged in its cheek. Even so, the ending managed to make me cry, so props to Berger for capturing the full range of emotions with this one.

Silverian Stables isn’t technically a ranch, as it is in a fantasy story and the stable is more a place where the horses of the knights, travelers, and other high-born’s horses are kept, but in only a few pages I was sold and ready to start the long trek up Mount Saddle. The stables become a focal point in book two where the Stable Master is one of the main characters. We get a loving peek into her life and the lives of those caring for the horses. The horses that fill the stables feel like ones I have known all my life and am dying to ride. Even though it is fantasy romance, it reads like any great small-town story, just with an added hint of magic.

Mark Twain’s King Arthur time travel novel led to numerous others.

While Twain’s novel is more of a veiled attempt to depict his own time, other authors have depicted Camelot as a utopian place and asked what the world would be like if it had not fallen. In The Forever King, a young boy, Arthur Blessing, turns out to be a reincarnated King Arthur. He travels back in time to Camelot to try to restore its past glory.

He failed in the past, but with the help of the Holy Grail, he is determined not to fail again. The novel led to two sequels. Like all these time travel novels, the goal is to change the past to create a better future. But utopias are always hard to achieve.