Title: surprisingly good and useful
Product review: I am not at all a fan of Bradley's Avalon books, finding them exploitative at best, and I am not usually a follower of the scholarship of John and Caitlin Matthews, finding their slant normally too esoteric and new-agey to be a source of useful information about Arthurian matters. However, I picked up this book recently after consciously avoiding it for years, and was very pleasantly surprised: if you gloss over the "goddess archetype" premise, and simply read the different sections, you will find some interesting, useful, well-researched, well-presented information regarding some potential roots of each character they address. The Matthewses shouldn't be the only scholars you follow - the works of Geoffrey Ashe, Norris Lacy, Roger Sherman Loomis, Jean Markale, Ronan Coghlan, and many others are useful and valid for those interested in the topic - but you could do a lot worse than to add "Ladies of the Lake" to your armory of Arthurian knowledge.
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