Can't believe it took me so long to read this one: it is a DELIGHT! Hambly's signature exquisite, sensual prose and smart women being excellent are onCan't believe it took me so long to read this one: it is a DELIGHT! Hambly's signature exquisite, sensual prose and smart women being excellent are on full display, but with bonus RIDICULOUSLY FUN AND ADORABLE demon-hunting Pekengese dogs!!! Instant favourite! ...more
*I received this book for free from the author in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my revi*I received this book for free from the author in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.*
A Marriage of Undead Convenience is exactly what it wants to be, short and sweet but with a nice bite to it. I’d almost call it cosy, for all that that Shadowcroft Manor itself is no such thing (it needs a proper scrub-up!); it’s a lovely wish-fulfilment romance, where the stakes are plenty high but nothing really terrible is going to happen, so you can just settle in somewhere comfortable to enjoy the story.
You know exactly what you’re getting from the (fabulous) opening line;
It was Margaret Dunhaven’s opinion that a marriage which constrained her to drink stale tea could not be described as “convenient” in any meaningful sense of the word.
Burgis does a great job at gently making it clear that Margaret doesn’t need a man, or marriage, while letting Margaret realise for herself that it is perfectly acceptable to want one, especially one who supports and appreciates and admires you. And there’s no getting around the fact that this kind of marriage is extremely convenient for a woman in this sort of setting (stale tea aside) – as Margaret herself says, there’s a great deal a married couple can do together that an unmarried woman can’t do at all, and why not avail yourself of that, when the man is a great one?
I love stories about scholars, and characters in general who have intense passions, and Margaret’s deep study of the Rose of Normandy delighted me. Her scholarliness infuses every aspect of her character and never goes forgotten, from her careful handling of age-old texts, to reflexively maintaining the order in which they’re stored, to how wonderfully appalled she is at seeing original sources mistreated – and that’s without going into her rivalry with another, complete asshat of a researcher who I badly wanted to punch in the face. What a despicable, yet depressingly believable, little man!
It’s the attention to detail that elevates A Marriage of Undead Convenience, like the (much better than the real-life version, imo) in-universe explanation for the name of the War of the Roses, or what exactly an ancient gem would look like, having not had the benefit of modern jewel-cutting techniques. It adds just a little bit of sparkle – the details, I mean, not the gem-cutting! – so that a sweet novella also has…a little ginger? I don’t know how to put it, but I suspect most readers know what I mean anyway.
3rd June 2024: So I am about 99% sure this is the book that was first announced as The Woman in the Obsidian Mirror, which had a much cooler synopsis 3rd June 2024: So I am about 99% sure this is the book that was first announced as The Woman in the Obsidian Mirror, which had a much cooler synopsis I will record below;
An epic, magical tale, set against the backdrop of the final days of the Aztec Empire and reimagining the life of Malinalxochitl-otherwise known as La Malinche-a Nahua warrior priestess-in-training caught between two vicious men, both of whom have wronged her and her people.
Five hundred years ago, Spanish conquistadors destroyed the wondrous Mexica (known as "Aztec") city of Tenochtitlan, thus beginning the history of modern-day Mexico. Hernando Cortés and Moctezuma were at the helms of power, but today many people blame a young Indigenous Nahua woman for the cataclysm. Known by many names-Malinalli, Malintzin, La Malinche, Doña Marina and Malinalxochitl, she was only eighteen when she was awarded to Cortés as a war prize. Cortés saw the value in her command of Indigenous languages, and though her exact role has been lost to history, she has long been seen as a woman who betrayed her culture. Debut author Veronica Chapa reinterprets her epic story with great power and empathy.
The firstborn in a set of fraternal twins, Mali spends her early years eager to take her rightful place as a student in Tenochtitlan's House of Magical Studies. Then tragedy strikes and she leaves home to study elsewhere among powerful priestesses. All the while, she hungers for revenge against Moctezuma, whom she believes responsible for destroying her family. Turmoil lands her under Cortés's control, working as his interpreter. She takes pride in the role-until she discovers his quest to conquer both his "new world" and her spirit. Far from home and with nothing and no one to fall back on, she dedicates herself to brokering peace between Cortes and those he meets en route to Tenochtitlan, where her powers fully emerge and her loyalties will be tested, with fateful consequences.
Feel like that's a much better blurb but I don't care too much as long as it's the same book!...more
*I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the c*I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.*
I really had no idea what to expect of Nicked, but it turns out that as well as being elegantly written about an inherently cool topic – a saint heist! – it’s also funny, wry, hopeful, and clever. And inspired by true events! Excuse me while I go down a rabbit hole of research into the history of saint-stealing!
Nicked says quite a lot without directly saying it – there’s a fair bit of implicit commentary (is that a thing?) on what we’d now call the Catholic Church, not so much on the faith itself (although also that, specifically the obsession with saints and saint-worship) as on the higher-ups who pull the strings and make decisions for everyone else. For example, it’s not poor Nicephorus’ dream that sets this whole thing off – the wealthy of Bari have already decided Bari must have a saint’s relics, and their motivations are certainly not religious. The Church higher-ups who help arrange the expedition are also not actually doing so out of faith; all those movers and shakers are in it for the money and the prestige, or both. Nicephorus’ dream is the thinnest of gauze tissues with which they try to hide their own greed – one wonders who they think they’re fooling, because it’s not each other, and it’s surely not God. Do these people even believe at all? Judging by the way everyone refuses to ever explicitly say they are committing blasphemy (or would it be sacrilege?), I think they know God wouldn’t be happy with them – which they presumably wouldn’t worry about if they didn’t believe?
Or maybe it’s more like, ‘I don’t know if He’s real, but let’s act like He is just in case, and also He totally won’t know what we’re really up to if we never say it outright’.
Which is more than a bit ridiculous, but it’s a very self-aware ridiculousness, wry and charming, that’s woven throughout the whole book. At the same time, there’s a streak of quite lovely earnestness, mostly coming from Nicephorus, who is a dear and a darling with unexpected depth – not because he’s naive (he isn’t) but he may be the only real believer among the cast, and I was surprised to find myself liking him for it. (Probably because he’s not stuffy and arrogant about it.) I adored his growth over the course of the book, and the misadventures he got into, and his ending! I would happily read a whole series about the shenanigans he gets into, but Nicked is perfect as a standalone too.
(…And I only just realised that Nicked, as a title, echoes St Nicholas, as in, you’ve been St-Nicholased! How did I miss that?!)
I don’t know anything about St Nicholas as a saint, so I have no idea if the stories about him contained in Nicked are genuinely part of his lore (…probably not the right way to refer to it!) or if Anderson made them up, but I loved how they were written, and the way Anderson tied them together and pulled morals from them. The prose is gorgeous in those parts – and it’s quite lovely and elegant in the rest of the book, quick and bright.
And the nuns. The not-nuns. I CACKLED.
Anyway, I strongly recommend this if the blurb sounds at all interesting to you, because it’s great fun and very human and the cast is marvellous. Going straight on my favourites shelf – I’m going to have to see what else Anderson’s written!...more
HIGHLIGHTS ~midwives get RESPECT ~know! your!! myths!!! ~not all men sure but DEFINITELY this one ~the MC is Too Logical ~4.5 stars happily rounded up.
Rtc!
HIGHLIGHTS ~midwives get RESPECT ~know! your!! myths!!! ~not all men sure but DEFINITELY this one ~the MC is Too Logical ~sapphic selkies ftw
A Sweet Sting of Salt is what I think is called low fantasy – there’s not a lot of magic at all, and what there is doesn’t try to explain itself. But it’s also a fantasy in the sense of, this is almost a historical fiction novel, but it’s one where queer characters get their happy endings without too much homophobia; where women escape and make lives for themselves outside of the patriarchy, again without nearly as much trouble as people of the time period probably would have experienced. It’s fantasy in the same way a daydream is fantasy, in that one aspect, and I really appreciated it.
There’s enough queerphobia in the real world, I don’t want to read about it in my fiction, okay?
But though it’s low-magic, don’t think this is a low-stakes, low-tension novel, because it most certainly is not. Anxiety for the characters had my guts in knots for a good half of the book, and there’s real, and really awful, violence, with the threat of worse hanging over the heads of the MC and her love interest.
It’s not a chill time, is what I’m saying here. A Sweet Sting of Salt is, well, sweet, but it’s also heart-in-your-throat nerve-wracking when it’s not giving you heart-ache – or both at once! Don’t curl up with this one expecting a calm cosy read, because that is NOT what you’re going to get!
Jean was outed by the spiteful mother of the girl she loved years ago, but earned back the respect of her neighbours by becoming a very skilled midwife. (This is not a coincidence; Jean’s amazing mentor, the half-Indigenous Anneke, deliberately set Jean to learning midwifery because few people are so bigoted they’re willing to ostracize the person their lives, or those of their female relatives, will almost certainly depend on someday.) And as the blurb says, the story gets moving when a heavily pregnant woman Jean didn’t even know about (what kind of pregnant person wouldn’t make sure the local midwife knew about their condition?) appears on her land late at night, only to go ahead and have the fastest and easiest delivery Jean has ever seen.
The mysterious woman is Muirin, who barely speaks a word of English – and yet, Jean is able to pick up on something between Muirin and her husband, Tobias, that makes her insist Muirin and the newborn stay with her for a while ‘just to make sure all’s well’.
I despise the lack-of-communication trope, where things could be cleared up so easily if characters just talked to each other clearly and honestly – but in Sweet Sting of Salt, the issue is that Muirin legitimately can’t communicate, as she knows very little English. And although the reader knows – or at least strongly suspects! – that Muirin is a selkie, and that’s probably why she’s so (charmingly) odd and doesn’t speak English, Jean reaches very logical conclusions to her own questions about Muirin’s nature and origins. A whole lot of assumptions are made, but they’re well-reasoned given what Jean knows of the world. This isn’t one of those stories where the supernatural is staring the MC in the face the entire time and they almost wilfully refuse to see it; although I was frantic for Jean to figure things out and get to helping Muirin, I could absolutely follow her reasoning when she came up with explanations for Muirin’s lack of family, her ignorance of the local culture, and even her strained relationship with Tobias. It was – kind of amusingly frustrating, that Jean was so rational? That there were so many perfectly obvious, perfectly reasonable explanations for all of Jean’s questions? There was just no way for someone in Jean’s position – in life, in history, in geography, even in the patriarchy – to put it together that Muirin isn’t a foreigner in a bad position, but an honest-to-gods selkie.
Part of that – and this is really my only critique of the book – is that selkies never come up in Jean’s thoughts or any other part of her life. I was really surprised that Sutherland never took the time to let the reader know what a selkie actually is – especially given that there was one scene in particular, when a child is asking for water-legend stories, that would have been the perfect moment to introduce the concept and make sure the reader knew the myth of the selkie. If you don’t already know what a selkie is when you go into this book, there’s a good chance you’ll be pretty confused when the reveal does come, as the book is written as if it’s taken for granted that every reader knows about selkies.
I mean, I do? But I’m a myth-nerd born in Ireland, where selkie stories are traditional. I’m not sure how or why Sutherland – or her editor – expects most readers to know what she’s on about. Selkies are not a type of magical creature that show up a lot in fantasy fiction; everyone knows what a dragon is (debates about how many limbs they should have aside) but selkies? Joane Harris’ The Blue Salt Road is the only selkie book I can think of from a reasonably-big-name author, and I don’t think it made enough of a splash (hah!) to put selkies on the map, as it were.
But as I said, this is a very low-magic historical fantasy, where the selkie reveal is a comparatively minor plot-point near the end of the book. Infinitely more important is the relationship that develops between Jean and Muirin, how trust becomes friendship becomes another kind of love; and there are definitely feminist themes, as the blurb promises, but Sweet Sting of Salt never feels like an IssuesTM book – I never felt like I was being preached at, or that Sutherland was stating the obvious and rubbing my face in it, as other heavier-handed storytellers have done.
I think it helps that the focus of the book is so intimate; it’s not an IssuesTM story because it is Jean-and-Muirin’s story. And a big part of that story is the legal powerlessness of women in this time period; is the specific danger most women and femmes face from most cis men, ie the threat of someone who is bigger and stronger than you; is the slowly growing horror of just how awful Muirin’s situation is – one that she is only in because of supernatural means, but that plenty of human women have experienced through history, and still do today. But I appreciated that these were all treated less as themes and more like real, practical problems faced by the characters, if that makes any kind of sense. It’s not about lessons for the reader, it’s about the stumbling blocks and hindrances and outright dangers the characters have to overcome to get their happy ending.
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