PANK’s Books We Can’t Quit series reviews books that are at least ten years old and have shadowed and shaded, infected and influenced, struck and stuck with us ever since we first read them.

Del Rey
912 pages, $25.84

Review by Dawn D’Aries

Once upon a summer in the mid-1980s, while perusing the shelves in a B. Dalton’s bookstore, I discovered a tome – as thick as the Bible — which granted me access to a world I had theretofore never imagined existed.

The tome’s paperback cover was intriguing: a white swan; a gold-hilted sword held aloft by an enrobed woman; a handsome white steed, its hooves obscured in mist. On the inside pages, the Prologue began:

 Morgaine speaks…

In my time I have been called many things: sister, lover, priestess, wise-woman, queen. Now in truth I have come to be wise-woman, and a time may come when these things may need to be known.

Here was a narrator who embodied all my girlhood fantasies of being queen of the woods behind my home, or a priestess who could harness the power of the wind. The novel, The Mists of Avalon, became my first purchase with the babysitting money I’d saved. Written by Marion Zimmer Bradley and first published in 1982, it is a clever interpretation of the legend of King Arthur, including the Knights of the Round Table, Lancelot, Guinevere, and Morgan le Fay. Continue reading →