Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
The Ancient Future by Traci Harding. Wow - I bought this one back in 2009 in a 100% rebate sale.
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It was still over-priced. Basic premise is that a young Australian woman gets taken back to early 500s Britain. Luckily she speaks the language, since her father is an early Welsh language specialist, and she is also a competion-winning black belt something or other.
I could just about forgive those. After all, there ought to be something special about her for her to have been chosen by whoever did the time travel spell.
She meets a Prince and escort. She knows of the prince (Maelgwn) from history, and so guesses that she's back around 520AD. The prince tells her that there year is, in fact, 519(!)
Which is very odd, since the
AD method of counting years wasn't invented until six years later, in Rome, and wasn't used widely for many years after, and the first extant British use is by the Venerable Bede in the early 700s.
And then there's the dialog. Obviously, the conversations are in Ancient Welsh. but they are erratically translated, sometimes into modern colloquialisms, and sometimes into cod-Shakespearean with 'thy' and 'dost' for no reason that I can tell.
I certainly won't be bothering with any further books in the series, so I think it's time to "abandon book" and move onto something else.