Member Review

I enjoyed this book! One thing that felt fresh about it, for me, was that the central character and narrator May isn’t educated. A lot of the historical fiction I’ve read is narrated by educated, very (sometimes too) eloquent characters. May isn’t that, which isn’t to say she’s not clever – she’s pretty sharp. But it felt a nice change to be seeing the book’s world through someone who doesn’t feel suspiciously modern and book-learned.

I liked some of the little point-of-view touches too: like the fact that a number of the higher-born characters from the court are referred to by the nicknames May gives them – Mush Face, The Painted Pig, The Willow Tree, The Country Mouse – rather than their actual names (because, of course, she wouldn’t know them and they wouldn’t ever think to tell someone of her status). This and other things really did make me feel I was seeing the world through May’s eyes.

The ‘alt-history’ aspect of the book is interesting: it’s not Queen Elizabeth but ‘Queen Bethany’, and not protestants vs catholics but ‘makers’ vs ‘Ainglish’, and so on. This was occasionally distracting: in my head I was mentally doing the ‘Oh wait, so that’s Thomas Seymour…’ calculations, which took me out of the story momentarily. But I liked it too: not being quite sure what’s real history and what’s fiction. It’s a book that’ll send you on some Wikipedia hunts, and they’re always fun.

I was fascinated by the concept of sin eaters – people who visit the dying to hear their confessions of sins, and then come back after they die to ‘eat’ those sins (with different foods corresponding to different sins) to absolve them. These were real people from history, and I’d never heard of them before. The book also felt like it didn’t pull any punches with the sheer unpleasantness of life for someone of May’s class and (enforced) career: the stinks, the sheer bleakness, come across regularly.

The ending felt like it came and played out very quickly, and I occasionally had a twinge of not quite understanding why May wasn’t running a mile from the murderous court intrigues, even with her motivations for getting involved. But then, that would make for a much less interesting novel!