cover image Avelynn

Avelynn

Marissa Campbell. St. Martin’s Griffin, $15.99 trade paper (320p) ISBN 978-1-250-06393-9

Campbell’s conventional fiction debut begins in the year 869 C.E. in Wessex, Britain, and follows Avelynn, daughter of the Earl of Somerset. Avelynn hopes to marry for love, but her father betroths her to Demas of Wareham, whom she dislikes. Avelynn, somewhat unbelievably, is secretly a pagan; after slipping away for a ritual, she encounters Alrik, a Viking boat captain on his way to Ireland. The two fall in love, but Demas’s machinations, the looming Viking invasion of Britain, and Avelynn’s station in life conspire to keep them apart. Though the novel is adequately researched, the heroine’s anachronistic attitudes are grating, and Campbell’s prose is clunky. The plot moves well, but characters change their minds about major issues seemingly at whim, and the complexity and depth of the political history is not written as well as the romance—which, although fairly well executed, is predictable at its heart. Agent: Margaret Bail, Inklings Literary Agency. (Sept.)