![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Hild (Griffith)
Mar. 25th, 2014 09:31 amYeah, this book is that good that I just wanted to TALK about it!
5/5. I adored this book. It basically hit all my buttons it possibly could: seventh-century Britain; a carefully researched milieu that felt real; prose that felt real (sorry, Guy Gavriel Kay, I like your books but I cannot take your prose seriously); politics and more politics; three-dimensional characters, all of whom are political beings and none of whom are one-dimensional heroes or villains; consideration of the webs of power with both women and men; a powerful woman protagonist whose power is intertwined and rooted in being female while the fact that she is still in primarily a man's world is not ignored; women friendships; friendships (of all gender-flavors, whee!) complicated by sex and friendships explicitly not complicated by sex; thoughtfulness about religion and how it is complicated by power; a way of looking at the world that shifted from the old religion to Christianity that rang true to me (in particular, the way that Hild thinks is not at all the way that Paulinus, for example, thinks); the twisting relationship between observation/deduction and prophecy/religion; even a number of shiny things! So, you know.
( Minor general spoilers; tried not to be specific. Comparison to Cherryh and Mantel whom I haven't read; formal lifelong platonic female bonds and authors making up stuff; shiny things; warnings. )
Anyway. It's the kind of thing that I would super-recommend to many people, and would not recommend at all to others. I don't think my sister, for example, would like it at all (she doesn't really go in for Cherryh or Byatt).
I need to go back and read Bede again!
5/5. I adored this book. It basically hit all my buttons it possibly could: seventh-century Britain; a carefully researched milieu that felt real; prose that felt real (sorry, Guy Gavriel Kay, I like your books but I cannot take your prose seriously); politics and more politics; three-dimensional characters, all of whom are political beings and none of whom are one-dimensional heroes or villains; consideration of the webs of power with both women and men; a powerful woman protagonist whose power is intertwined and rooted in being female while the fact that she is still in primarily a man's world is not ignored; women friendships; friendships (of all gender-flavors, whee!) complicated by sex and friendships explicitly not complicated by sex; thoughtfulness about religion and how it is complicated by power; a way of looking at the world that shifted from the old religion to Christianity that rang true to me (in particular, the way that Hild thinks is not at all the way that Paulinus, for example, thinks); the twisting relationship between observation/deduction and prophecy/religion; even a number of shiny things! So, you know.
( Minor general spoilers; tried not to be specific. Comparison to Cherryh and Mantel whom I haven't read; formal lifelong platonic female bonds and authors making up stuff; shiny things; warnings. )
Anyway. It's the kind of thing that I would super-recommend to many people, and would not recommend at all to others. I don't think my sister, for example, would like it at all (she doesn't really go in for Cherryh or Byatt).
I need to go back and read Bede again!
