Touched by Venom: Book One of the Dragon Temple Saga. Janine Cross.

Cross, Janine. Touched by Venom: Book One of the Dragon Temple Saga. Roc, 2005.

First of all, this is a dystopian world. Our protagonist is in a very low class, and she's a woman in a world where women are treated poorly. We start out following her as she deals with a boy her own age, and we get to see how he's allowed to abuse her (and even her mother, to some extent) because, after all, he's male and they're mere females. Good times.

Second, as our protagonist moves from situation to situation and place to place, things rarely seem to improve all that much, and that's rough. Cross does a great job of paining the desperate picture of someone who has no home, no real positive long-term bonds. (I'm simplifying a bit, but the bonds she does have are complicated, and definitely not anything you could call positive without serious qualifications.)

The Book of Guinevere: Legendary Queen of Camelot. Andrea Hopkins.

 Hopkins, Andrea. The Book of Guinevere: Legendary Queen of Camelot. Saraband, 2004.

I can't decide if I enjoyed the book more for the text or for the illustrations. Both were fascinating--at least to someone like me, who's been weirdly into the whole Arthurian story for about as long as I can remember. Thing is, somehow I've mostly read modern re-tellings, and I definitely missed some of the "classic" medieval content, which is what Hopkins covers in this book. 

Basically, Hopkins goes through selected bits of medieval writings about Guinevere (also Gwynnever, Gwenever, Gwenhwyvar, Guenhumara, and on and on) to build a sense of her character as presented in those writings. Some view her more favorably, some view her less favorably, and different texts highlight different aspects of her personality.