Vivi Conway And The Sword Of Legend, by Lizzie Huxley-Jones (cover illustration by Harry Woodgate)
I was very excited to read this book.
As someone who’s probably autistic and still has an entire bookshelf dedicated to their intense, years-long interest in mythology, ‘Welsh myths but autism is also here’ seemed like a pretty great hook, so I preordered it- when publication day came and it hadn’t shown up, I spotted it in my local bookshop and bought it out of impatience. And then the preordered copy arrived. I regret nothing.
To give a super brief summary of the set-up, Vivi Conway And The Sword Of Legend is a middle-grade fantasy book about an autistic girl named Vivi who’s moving to London after living in the Welsh countryside for her whole life. She feels a strange kind of pull towards the lake near her house, and on the day of the move she goes for a morning swim to see if that’ll settle the feeling for good. Instead, she’s attacked by an afanc, pulls a sword from the lake bed, and gets a partial debriefing on her magical destiny by a talking ghost dog. Adventure ensues.
As a heroine, Vivi is brilliant. She’s sarcastic and stubborn but really likeable, and I especially loved her inner struggle with trusting again after being bullied so badly at her previous school- it’s written in a very relatable way, and I was really rooting for her to make the friends she deserved. Being treated poorly by people you thought you were your friends is unfortunately common among autistic people, and I’m glad this book shows you can make real friends, even if it’s hard to let them in at first.
I’ll come back to the disability representation later (because it’s great), but I’m going to go on a brief tangent to mention GELERT, who is possibly the best dog in all of fiction. Move over, Old Yeller, your competition is in town and he can take down WOLVES. And he’s really funny. I have an entire line in my notes that’s just ‘GELERT GELERT GELERT I LOVE YOU DOG’ and I feel like that’s about as much as I can say about how I feel about him without spoiling his backstory, so I will- regretfully- move on from Gelert.
I was surprised by how much I loved the supporting cast; not that I thought I’d hate them or anything, but I was sort of preparing myself for friends who were mostly there for the sake of the protagonist. Nope! Dara, Chia and Stevie are all very charming, with their own inner lives and arcs. I think Chia had the least amount of character development out of the three of them, but that’s okay because Chia is already perfect and has never done anything wrong in her life. She deserves the world.
Also, there’s a character called Emrys who shows up maybe halfway through to be really confusing and annoying and then leave, and I love that for him.
So, the disability rep! I knew going in that the protagonist was autistic and written by an autistic author, which made me much calmer going in regarding that area, but what I wasn’t expecting was the portrayal of a physical disability with Stevie. I did know she had a limb difference, but I wasn’t expecting them to address it at all- a lot of abled authors don’t, because they’re afraid of othering their disabled characters or making it seem like they’re too different from everyone else, and that is completely fair.
However, one thing that Lizzie Huxley-Jones clearly understands is that being disabled does make you different from everyone else, and that isn’t inherently a bad thing or a good thing. It’s just a neutral fact. You can force yourself to do things like other people, and that does work sometimes, but eventually you’ll need to make peace with going about things a different way (however different that may be) and do your best to find people who’ll accept that. Vivi and Stevie have managed that, and I hope any other disabled people can too.
Of course, I have to mention the LGBT representation as well. Dara is a wonderful example of a non-binary character- their pronouns and identity are never questioned (I liked the little detail of them also referring to Vivi with they/them pronouns during their first meeting, because of course they wouldn’t assume anything) and there’s some brief reflection on how they use clothes and crafting to feel more connected to how they look in the face of judgement from other people, which I really love. And Vivi has two mums! And they’re married! And they’re really cute! I love them!
The one thing that kept this as a 4.5/5 and not a 5/5 is the typos/weird grammar things. It wasn’t anything egregious, but on a fairly frequent basis I’d notice missing punctuation and slight misspellings (I got a bit confused at one point because Stevie’s surname was spelled differently at various points), and it was sometimes enough to trip me up while reading and cause me to lose a bit of momentum. Again, nothing too awful, but I think some more thorough editing could really have benefited it in this one aspect.
Other than that one thing, I LOVE this book. The prose is evocative but easy to understand, the cover is lovely (you should totally follow Harry Woodgate!), and while I won’t spoil it, the ending left me really wanting to see what happens in the next instalment. I would very much recommend gifting it to younger fantasy readers! They deserve to know about Gelert.
Bee Reads Books 