Kingdom of the Grail

This is one of AA Attanasio's older books, and I'd never heard of it before I picked it up, used, at Amazon. I bought it on the strength of Attanasio's previous books 'Arc of the Dream' and 'Wyvern', both of which I liked, but I was rather disapointed with this book.

Attanasio attempts to create a story around an implausible, but not impossible scenario. A Norman baroness of the Welsh Marches is ousted by her own son and sent off on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Scheming revenge along the way she finds a young Jewish woman named Rachel Tibbon who resembles her in her youth and through various circumstances she arranges for the young woman to take her place and return home masquerading as the old baroness, rejuvenated by having drunk of the holy grail.

Upon her arrival Rachel Tibbon goes through a series of adventures which test her resolve and force her to confront her own terrible past.

I didn't like the book because the characters were 'too American', by which I mean they reminded me of the characters from an episode of 'Xena the Warrior Princess', with American cultural values and personality traits injected to make the characters 'understandable' rather than characters of the European middle ages. Since Attanasio is an American, then this ought not surprise, but it did. It made the book dull, and the climax became very predictable and thus uninteresting.