The Blurb (from Goodreads):
For me, the best crime novels are tense, evocative reads, set somewhere misty and atmospheric that raises the hairs on your skin, with characters who are complex and alive, who you cannot help caring about, and written in terse language that nonetheless has the power to haunt you with its beauty. I want to be moved by the characters’ plight and gripped by the compulsion to know what happened, and I want to be genuinely surprised by the denouement.
It is, unsurprisingly, difficult to find all that in the one package. When I do find it, I tend to be very faithful to the author, reading every book of theirs I can find.
The Ruin, by Irish-born Australian-resident author Dervla McTiernan, gave me all that I wanted in a contemporary crime novel, but since it is her debut, I can’t rush out and buy all of her backlist. I am, however, impatiently waiting for her next book.
The story is set in Ireland, a suitably misty and atmospheric setting for me. It begins with a young rookie policeman, Cormac Reilly, discovering the corpse of a drug addict in a cold and filthy ruin of a house. It seems clear enough that she died of a drug overdose. The real trouble is what to do with her two young children. Regretfully Cormac arranges for them to go into foster care, but something about the brother and sister haunt him. He never really forgets them.
Now, many years later, Cormac is back in Galway, after having taken a demotion in order to move with his girlfriend, who has taken a plum new job in the area. He is frustrated because his new commander gives him nothing but cold cases to work on, and he wants to get his teeth into something real.
Then a body is found floating in the freezing black waters of the river. It’s a young man named Jack – and he is the little boy Cormac put into care so long ago. When the detective begins digging, he finds that Jack’s death was not a suicide, as the police believe – and that the roots of the mystery lie in the death of Jack’s mother so long ago.
I really loved the character of Cormac, who has troubles of his own but is not one of those drunk, damaged detectives that seem to have taken over so much of contemporary crime fiction lately (I am really tired of that trope, are you?) Cormac is clever, dogged, and wants to help people, and his love for his girlfriend and his willingness to make sacrifices for her makes him a very empathetic character.
Best of all, the dramatic tension in this novel never flags. I was absolutely riveted to the page, each new unexpected turn tightening the screw. And, no, I didn’t guess the murderer!
The Ruin is world-class crime fiction, and Dervla McTiernan cannot write fast enough to please me.
My Thoughts:
For me, the best crime novels are tense, evocative reads, set somewhere misty and atmospheric that raises the hairs on your skin, with characters who are complex and alive, who you cannot help caring about, and written in terse language that nonetheless has the power to haunt you with its beauty. I want to be moved by the characters’ plight and gripped by the compulsion to know what happened, and I want to be genuinely surprised by the denouement.
It is, unsurprisingly, difficult to find all that in the one package. When I do find it, I tend to be very faithful to the author, reading every book of theirs I can find.
The Ruin, by Irish-born Australian-resident author Dervla McTiernan, gave me all that I wanted in a contemporary crime novel, but since it is her debut, I can’t rush out and buy all of her backlist. I am, however, impatiently waiting for her next book.
The story is set in Ireland, a suitably misty and atmospheric setting for me. It begins with a young rookie policeman, Cormac Reilly, discovering the corpse of a drug addict in a cold and filthy ruin of a house. It seems clear enough that she died of a drug overdose. The real trouble is what to do with her two young children. Regretfully Cormac arranges for them to go into foster care, but something about the brother and sister haunt him. He never really forgets them.
Now, many years later, Cormac is back in Galway, after having taken a demotion in order to move with his girlfriend, who has taken a plum new job in the area. He is frustrated because his new commander gives him nothing but cold cases to work on, and he wants to get his teeth into something real.
Then a body is found floating in the freezing black waters of the river. It’s a young man named Jack – and he is the little boy Cormac put into care so long ago. When the detective begins digging, he finds that Jack’s death was not a suicide, as the police believe – and that the roots of the mystery lie in the death of Jack’s mother so long ago.
I really loved the character of Cormac, who has troubles of his own but is not one of those drunk, damaged detectives that seem to have taken over so much of contemporary crime fiction lately (I am really tired of that trope, are you?) Cormac is clever, dogged, and wants to help people, and his love for his girlfriend and his willingness to make sacrifices for her makes him a very empathetic character.
Best of all, the dramatic tension in this novel never flags. I was absolutely riveted to the page, each new unexpected turn tightening the screw. And, no, I didn’t guess the murderer!
The Ruin is world-class crime fiction, and Dervla McTiernan cannot write fast enough to please me.
You might also like to read my review of The Scholar by Dervla McTiernan:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-scholar-by-dervla-mctiernan
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
This is the story of a river and the making of water and the nature of love. Some would say that any story of water is always a story of magic, and others would say any story of love was the same …’
The River Wife is a simple and subtle story of love. The river wife—part human, part fish—has a duty to tend the river, but instead falls in love with a man. The age-old rhythms of her life irrevocably alter as he trespasses further and further into her heart at a time when she questions her birthright. Tender and stunningly beautiful, The River Wife speaks of desire and love, mothers and daughters, kinship and care, sacrifice and wisdom. It is completely captivating
My Thoughts:
A strange, beautiful, lyrical book, set in modern-day Tasmania, about a woman who every night changes into the form of a fish. She does not understand where she came from or why she must change. She only knows she is a river wife and must sing the river’s songs, and that she is desperately lonely.
This book walks the shadowy borderland between fiction and fable, prose and poetry, myth and magic realism. It is a love story, an exploration of the importance of story to the making of self, a paean to the beauty and power of nature, and a warning of the dangers of not listening. Utterly haunting, exquisite, and unique.
You might also like to read my review of To The Bright Edge Of The World by Eowyn Ivey:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-bright-edge-of-the-world-by-eowyn-ivey
I was recently contacted by a group of college students in the US who are studying my books as part of a module on fairy tale adaptions. They are asked me some really interesting and insightful questions, and I thought I’d share my answers with you all.
What's the difference between the original stories and retellings that you write? How do you make them unique?
There is rarely such a thing as an 'original' fairy tale, since most have ancient roots that stretch back into deep time, before alphabets and writing systems were invented. Oral fairy tales change and grow and adapt as they are told and retold, and so there can be many different variants of the same tale type appearing at different times and in different cultures.
For example, the oldest known version of 'Cinderella' - called 'Ye Xian' - was recorded in China during the Tang dynasty (in 853 AD). It travelled the silk roads back to Europe, and disseminated along trade routes throughout Europe. Dozens of different variants are found, in countries as diverse as Greece and Ireland and Hungary and Norway , before the pattern of action was 'crystallised' (i.e. found a form that most people recognise as the tale 'Cinderella') in the story told by Charles Perrault in 1697. Most subsequent uses of the tale draw upon this crystallised tale, but not all - some writers (like me) are interested in older, often forgotten versions of tales.
There are, of course, entirely new and original literary fairy tales as well, such as the ones written by Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde or Mary de Morgan. They usually contain with them key tropes of older tales, however, and usually mimic the language of fairy tales with familiar terms such as 'once upon a time' or 'they all lived happily ever after.'
How I choose to work with a fairy tale very much depends on my proposed medium. If I am adapting it for an oral storytelling performance, I simplify the pattern of action, distilling it down to its purest and most potent form, and then I rewrite it using the Three Rs of Storytelling (rhythm, rhyme, repetition) to make it as memorable as possible. Each oral performance lasts for 10-20 minutes, and I need to be able to tell the whole story from memory without any prompts. The use of rhythm, rhyme and repetition also makes the story more memorable for my audience, which is something greatly to be desired.
If I am retelling a tale for a collection of illustrated stories, like those in the 'Long Lost Fairy Tales', I research the tale's origins and variants, and choose which elements I wish to keep and which I choose to discard. Many transcriptions of an oral tale are flat and truncated, and so I seek to deepen and enrich the tales with vivid cultural details. For example, retelling a Sami tale called 'A Mother's Yarn' from the Arctic Circle, I researched what life was like for the Sami, what they ate and wore and how they hunted and fished and played music, and some of their folklore and superstitions and beliefs, so I could bring their world - the world of the story - to life.
If I am drawing upon a fairy tale as a form of intertextuality in a novel, my use of it is usually much more subtle and surprising. I am interested in the history of the tales, and how and why they change and adapt, and I am also interested in how their meanings are at once universal and yet unique to the teller and to their audience. For example, my novel Beauty in Thorns is an exploration of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones's lifelong obsession with the 'Sleeping Beauty' fairy tale, told through the eyes of the four women who most inspired him. I draw upon the structures and symbols of the tale, and highlight some of the uncanny synchronicities between it and the lives of the four women, yet the book can be read without knowing I've drawn upon the fairy tale at all. In my novel The Wild Girl, I create an imagined life of Dortchen Wild, the young woman who told the Grimm brothers many of their most famous tales. Again, I am interested in what the tales she told show us about her inner life, rather than in simply retelling her stories (though I do that too).
What’s your process of retelling stories? What resources do you refer to?
I have a vast library of books on fairy tales, and am always buying more. I also collect old fairy tale collections, as I like to be able to track changes to a story over time. Many old reference books are now available online, which can make my search easier. Basically, I begin by reading a story, studying it, hunting down variants to the tale and comparing them to each other, and researching the history of its tellers. It needs to spark ideas and images and connections in my head, else I cannot work with it. Once the story lives in my imagination, then I begin to find the words to tell it. This can take a surprisingly long time.
How do you think the Disney princesses impacted entertainment today?
Disney Studios have been highly influential on most people's understanding of fairy tales. This has been both positive - these fairy tales may have been lost or forgotten if Disney had not breathed new life into them - and also negative, in that some of the early Disney films are female-reductive and disempowering. Disney certainly opened up a rich field for fairy tale scholars to study and discuss and dissect the classic Western canon of fairy tales, and encouraged many other creative artists to explore these old tales in new, fresh and surprising ways, in theatre, dance, art, photography, film and advertising mediums. That is, I think, a wonderful thing.
What do you think of Disney’s adaptation of these stories? Do you think they represent the whole story in an appropriate manner? Would you disapprove of their rewritings of the classic fairy tales?
These are not questions to be answered easily or simplistically. For example, 'Snow White & the Seven Dwarves' was Disney's first full-length adaptation, released in 1937. The titular heroine can seem stupid and sickeningly sweet to modern eyes, spending her time cheerfully scrubbing floors and singing with bluebirds. Yet you must remember it was released in the darkest days of World War II, at a time when it seemed all hope was lost and Nazism was crushing all opposition. A story about love and goodness conquering evil was badly needed at that time, and 'Snow White' - with its themes of rebirth and resurrection - spoke powerfully to that need.
In addition, its signature mix of charm and humour with danger and darkness was pitch-perfect, reflecting the dual nature of this most ancient - and double-voiced - of art forms.
'Sleeping Beauty' was released in 1959, and it suffers a great deal from the conservatism and misogyny of its time - Aurora, the heroine, is awake for only 18 minutes of the whole film and barely speaks at all. 'Sleeping Beauty' was criticised severely for this, however, and performed poorly at the box office.
It was 30 years before Disney attempted another fairy tale retelling, with 'The Little Mermaid' in 1989. This time, they changed the story's ending completely - and have been criticised for abandoning the author's clear intention, and turning an eerie unhappy tale into a joyous romantic comedy.
Stories are not insects trapped in amber, however, frozen in time for millennium. Like language itself, stories grow and change and adapt and are transformed according to the time and place in which they are found. I may not make the same creative choices as Disney Studios in my creative reimaginings; but I would absolutely defend their right to make them as they thought best.
Who is your favorite Disney princess? Why?
Beauty from 'Beauty and the Beast', perhaps because it was the first fairy tale script written by a woman, Linda Woolverton, and so it was a little less female-reductive than earlier Disney retellings. Also, 'Beauty' likes books, and it has a delightful singing teapot in it.
Or maybe Merida from 'Brave'. Is she a Disney princess?
You might also like to read my writing blog on the best Fairy Tale books:
VINTAGE POST: Best Books on Fairy Tales
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
1940. Parisian seamstress Estella Bissette is forced to flee France as the Germans advance. She is bound for Manhattan with a few francs, one suitcase, her sewing machine, and a dream: to have her own atelier.
2015. Australian curator Fabienne Bissette journeys to the annual Met Gala for an exhibition of her beloved grandmother's work - one of the world's leading designers of ready-to-wear. But as Fabienne learns more about her grandmother's past, she uncovers a story of tragedy, heartbreak and secrets - and the sacrifices made for love.
Crossing generations, society's boundaries and international turmoil, The Paris Seamstress is the beguiling, transporting story of the special relationship between a grandmother and her granddaughter as they attempt to heal the heartache of the past.
My Thoughts:
A dual-timeline novel that moves between the 1940s and contemporary times, The Paris Seamstress is a gorgeously rich and romantic novel about young women finding their way in the world.
The story begins with Estella Bissette, a young apprentice seamstress working with her mother at a fashion designer’s atelier in Paris. Her metier is creating silk flowers, but she dreams of designing her own dresses and takes every opportunity to practise her craft. But the Nazis are closing on France, and no-one knows what the future will hold. One day Estella gets caught up in a mysterious errand that smacks of intrigue and resistance … and meets a handsome stranger. With her life in danger, she must flee France, and with her mother’s help, gets a bunk on the SS Washington - the last American ship to leave French waters – with nothing more than a suitcase and a sewing machine.
The other narrative thread concerns Estelle’s granddaughter Fabienne, who arrives in Manhattan from Sydney for a celebration of her famous ancestor’s fashion designs. Fabienne is puzzled by some mystery in her grandmother’s past which the recent death of her father has revealed to her, and wishes to question her … but Estella is elderly and frail, and talk of the past upsets her. At the gala event, Fabienne meets a handsome stranger … but her own life is full of problems and troubles, and it seems unlikely their paths will ever cross again.
From that point onwards, the two stories cross and part and cross again, full of sensual descriptions of fabulous clothes and evocative descriptions of Paris and New York, then and now. I loved the story of how determined Estella builds her career from nothing, despite obstacle after obstacle, and I empathised with sensitive Fabienne, trying to step out from her grandmother’ shadow.
Much of the pleasure of this book is the wish-fulfillment fantasy it offers many women – the chance to imagine oneself in a swishy satin gown, drinking cocktails with high society in New York, flitting off to Paris on a whim and meeting the man of your dreams, inheriting palatial residences in two of the city’s most glamorous and sophisticated cities, making a name for oneself with your talent and hard work. The secret at the heart of the novel is not one of those surprising, oh-my-god-I-never-saw-that-coming plot twists that leaves you gasping – it’s more of a device to put the two women’s journeys into motion. But both of those journeys are so beguiling, I didn’t mind that at all.
And I just loved Estella’s final words to her granddaughter:
‘Be brave. Love well and fiercely. Be the woman I always knew you would be.’
These are wise and beautiful words indeed.
You might also like to read my review of The French Photographer by Natasha Lester:
BOOK REVIEW: The French Photographer by Natasha Lester
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
5 August, 1944: Over 1000 Japanese soldiers attempt to break out of the No. 12 Prisoner of War compound on the fringes of Cowra. In the carnage, hundreds are killed, many are recaptured and imprisoned, and some take their own lives rather than suffer the humiliation of ongoing defeat. But one soldier, Hiroshi, determined to avoid either fate, manages to escape.
At nearby Erambie Aboriginal mission, Banjo Williams, father of nine and proud man of his community, discovers a distraught Hiroshi, pleading for help. The people of Erambie have seen enough death and heartache, so Banjo and the Erambie community decide to offer Hiroshi refuge.
Mary, Banjo’s daughter, recently returned from being in service in Sydney, is intrigued by the Japanese stranger, and is charged with his care. Love blossoms, but life for the community on the mission is one of restriction – living under Acts of Protection and Assimilation, and always under the watchful eye of the mission manager. In wartime Australia, the children are terrified of air raids, but their parents fear a life without rights. And for Mary and Hiroshi, there is much in their way.
Mary is forbidden under the Act, and by her own father, to marry Hiroshi, so together they plot their own escape from the mission. But solidarity in the community is eroding and trouble is brewing.
My Thoughts:
A delicate and simply told love story set in Cowra, NSW, in the aftermath of the famous breakout of Japanese prisoners-of-war from their internment camp in 1944. Anita Heiss has drawn on her own family’s oral history to create this story of a Japanese soldier who is kept hidden by an Indigenous family who were themselves living in detention, on an Aboriginal mission nearby.
Hiroshi feels deep shame at being made a prisoner, and for failing to fight for his Emperor, but he cannot bring himself to commit ritual suicide like so many of the other escaped Japanese soldiers.
He is kept hidden by the Williams family, who work for a pittance for the mission. Food is scarce, and feeding an escaped prisoner stretches their resources to their limits. But they know what it is like to be considered a second-class citizen, and determine to act with the justice and compassion that White Australia has failed to show to them.
It is the job of the eldest daughter, Mary, to take Hiroshi food and water. Gradually, as they talk and share details of their lives, they fall in love. It is dangerous for them both, though. Hiroshi is an enemy, and feeling against the Japanese is running high in the small Australian town. And Mary is no more free – she is living under laws which seek to keep indigenous people disenfranchised and enslaved.
It was this aspect of the novel which I found most interesting. Anita Heiss draws clear parallels between the prisoner-of-war camp and the mission, and indeed makes it clear the Japanese prisoners often had a better quality of life than the original owners of the land.
GET YOUR COPY OF BARBED WIRE & CHERRY BLOSSOMS HEREYou might also like to read by review of The Yield by Tara June Winch:
BOOK REVIEW: The Yield by Tara June Winch
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
The most enchanting debut novel of 2018, this is an irresistible, deeply moving and romantic story of a young girl, daughter of an abusive father, who has to learn the hard way that she can break the patterns of the past, live on her own terms and find her own strength.
After her family suffers a tragedy when she is nine years old, Alice Hart is forced to leave her idyllic seaside home. She is taken in by her estranged grandmother, June, a flower farmer who raises Alice on the language of Australian native flowers, a way to say the things that are too hard to speak. But Alice also learns that there are secrets within secrets about her past. Under the watchful eye of June and The Flowers, women who run the farm, Alice grows up. But an unexpected betrayal sends her reeling, and she flees to the dramatically beautiful central Australian desert. Alice thinks she has found solace, until she falls in love with Dylan, a charismatic and ultimately dangerous man.
The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is a story about stories: those we inherit, those we select to define us, and those we decide to hide. It is a novel about the secrets we keep and how they haunt us, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive. Spanning twenty years, set between the lush sugar cane fields by the sea, a native Australian flower farm, and a celestial crater in the central desert, Alice must go on a journey to discover that the most powerful story she will ever possess is her own.
My Thoughts:
An astonishingly assured debut, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is a story of love, loss, betrayal and the redemptive power of storytelling. It is both heart-breaking and life-affirming.
A coming-of-age story with a vividly evocative Australian setting, this novel follows the story of Alice Hart who must learn to escape the shadows of an abusive father in order to build a life for herself.
At the age of nine, Alice suffers the tragic loss of her mother and baby brother. She is taken from her seaside home to live with her grandmother, June, who grows bush flowers and takes in battered and abused women so they can heal in peace. June has developed a secret language of Australian native flowers, to help say the things that are too hard to speak aloud.
Mute and damaged, Alice slowly begins to recover from the wounds of her past, but there are too many secrets, too many shadows. Hurt and betrayed, Alice flees the flower farm and heads into the hot red heart of the Australian desert. She begins to rebuild her life once again, and falls recklessly and dangerously in love.
Sensitive, sympathetic, and vulnerable, Alice is like so many young women, struggling to make sense of their life, wanting to love and be loved but hurt by the danger of feeling so deeply, and needing to find their own voice so they can finally speak up and tell their story. Her journey is one that feels so familiar, and yet is uniquely and powerfully her own.
The Australian landscape, and its strange and beautiful flora, also has a potent presence in the novel. I absolutely loved the use of the secret language of flowers, and how it helped those inarticulate with pain and grief find a way to speak out, tell their story and so find release and healing. The sparkling waters and deep dragging undertow of the seashore, the dull green-grey of the bush with its hidden beauties only visible to those who take the time to see, and the extraordinary fierce grandeur of the red heart of Australia were evoked with such clarity and intimacy, I could feel the heat on my skin, taste the dust on my tongue, smell the tang of eucalyptus and salt in the air.
The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is beautiful, powerful, intense, and tender, a book to shake your heart and bring a lump to your throat.
You might also like to read my review of The Yield by Tara June Winch:
BOOK REVIEW: The Yield by Tara June Winch
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
INGA Karlson died in a fire in New York in the 1930s, leaving behind three things: a phenomenally successful first novel, the scorched fragments of a second book— and a mystery that has captivated generations of readers.
Nearly fifty years later, Brisbane bookseller Caddie Walker is waiting in line to see a Karlson exhibition featuring the famous fragments when she meets a charismatic older woman.
The woman quotes a phrase from the Karlson fragments that Caddie knows does not exist—and yet to Caddie, who knows Inga Karlson’s work like she knows her name, it feels genuine.
Caddie is electrified. Jolted her from her sleepy, no-worries life in torpid 1980s Brisbane, she is driven to investigate: to find the clues that will unlock the greatest literary mystery of the twentieth century
My Thoughts:
What a wonderful book this is! Toni Jordan is one of my favourite Australian authors, drawing effortlessly on multiple genres to create charming, warm-hearted and utterly compelling novels that are each distinctly different from each other.
The Fragments is part-romantic comedy, part-literary mystery, and part-historical drama, all of which add up to a fresh and beguiling story centred on the lost novel of a mysterious woman writer of the 1930s.
Inga Karlson’s first book was a literary sensation, but tragically she died in a warehouse fire which also destroyed the only known copy of her second book. All that was left was a handful of burnt scraps of paper, tantalising her heartbroken fans and creating a literary industry that kept academics busy for decades.
Nearly fifty years later, in the 1980s, the fragments of her scorched book are brought to Brisbane as part of an exhibition celebrating Inga Karlson’s life and work. Caddie, a bookseller and failed academic, waits in a queue for hours to see the exhibition – she was named after Inga Karlson’s famous heroine and has worshipped her work all her life.
She falls into conversation with an enigmatic old woman, who seems to know more about the fragments than she should. Caddie is galvanised. She must know more. So she sets out on a quest to find the old woman, which leads her straight back to her failed dissertation and the man who broke her heart.
Moving back and forwards between 1980s Brisbane and 1930s New York, this is a book full of surprises. Brilliant!
You might also like to read my review of The Whole Bright Year by Debra Oswald:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-whole-bright-year-by-debra-oswald
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
Each lace shawl begins and ends the same way - with a circle. Everything is connected with a thread as fine as gossamer, each life affected by what has come before it and what will come after.
1941, Estonia. As Stalin's brutal Red Army crushes everything in its path, Katarina and her family survive only because their precious farm produce is needed to feed the occupying forces.
Fiercely partisan, Katarina battles to protect her grandmother's precious legacy - the weaving of gossamer lace shawls stitched with intricate patterns that tell the stories passed down through generations.
While Katarina struggles to survive the daily oppression, another young woman is suffocating in her prison of privilege in Moscow. Yearning for freedom and to discover her beloved mother's Baltic heritage, Lydia escapes to Estonia.
Facing the threat of invasion by Hitler's encroaching Third Reich, Katarina and Lydia and two idealistic young soldiers, insurgents in the battle for their homeland, find themselves in a fight for life, liberty and love.
My Thoughts:
A heart-wrenching novel of love, war and resistance set in Estonia in the 1940s, The Lace Weaver tells the story of two very different young women and their struggle to survive in a country caught between two of the greatest evils of the 20th century: Stalin’s Red Army and Hitler’s Third Reich.
The story begins in 1941, when Estonia is under Russian rule and suffering brutality, hunger and mass murders and deportations. Kati and her parents are doing the best they can by keeping their heads down and doing as they are told. Kati quietly rebels by keeping her beloved grandmother’s lace weaving circle alive, with a group of women meeting in secret to make the exquisite lace shawls that Estonia is famous for. The lace patterns become a repeating motif throughout the book, with each section named after one of the designs: Wolf’s Paw, Ring Pattern, Peacock’s Tails, Spider Stitch, Ash Pattern, and so on. I really love this aspect of the book, as the patterns became symbols for what the characters endured.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, another young woman named Lydia is living a life of ease and privilege with the bejewelled cage of the Stalinist elite. She longs to escape, however, as she gradually becomes aware of the cruelty of the Russian dictatorship. Eventually, she and her old nurse Olga escape to Estonia, only to be caught up in that country’s struggle for liberation.
For the oppressed Estonians, the news that Hitler’s forces are marching towards them brings hope and jubilation. It is not long, however, before they realise that they have exchanged one cruel regime for another. And Kati and Lydia are caught in the maelstrom, struggling just to survive.
This is a novel of love and war, heartbreak and hope, and the bonds between women, delicate as lace and yet as unbreakable as steel. Powerful, subtle and beautifully written and composed.
You might also like to read my review of The Huntress by Kate Quinn:
BOOK REVIEW: The Huntress by Kate Quinn
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
For the people of Caer Cad, ‘skin’ is their totem, their greeting, their ancestors, their land.
Ailia does not have skin. Abandoned at birth, she serves the Tribequeen of her township. Ailia is not permitted to marry, excluded from tribal ceremonies and, most devastatingly, forbidden to learn. But the Mothers, the tribal ancestors, have chosen her for another path.
Lured by the beautiful and enigmatic Taliesin, Ailia embarks on an unsanctioned journey to attain the knowledge that will protect her people from the most terrifying invaders they have ever faced.
Set in Iron-Age Britain on the cusp of Roman invasion, Skin is a thrilling, full-blooded, mesmerising novel about the collision of two worlds, and a young woman torn between two men.
My Thoughts:
Earlier this year I read Song Woman by Ilka Tampke and loved it. I had not realised it was the sequel to Skin, and so I grabbed a copy of the first in the series as soon as I could.
A dark historical fantasy set in Celtic Britain during the early days of the Roman invasion, it tells the story of Ailia, who was discovered as an abandoned newborn on the doorstep of her Tribequeen’s kitchen in the year 28 AD. Since her family is unknown, she has no ‘skin’, a kind of totemic knowledge that defines everyone in her culture. Without ‘skin’, she will always be an outsider. She can lie with a young man during the Beltane fires, for example, but she may not marry, and the hidden knowledge of the druids and the bards is forbidden to her.
Ailia is strong and clever, however, and not content with her lot in life. Rebelliously she seeks to learn whatever she can, and so strays into the Other World, where the Mothers give her gifts to help her discover her destiny. Torn between two lovers, struggling to understand her calling, Ailia will need all her strength and courage to face the invading Roman army.
Skin reminded me of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, which was one of my favourite books when I was a teenager. It has the same mysterious feel and tragic overtones of a magical world coming to an end, and the same beautiful lyrical writing. Highly recommended.
You might also like to read my review of Songwoman by Ilka Tampke:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-songwoman-by-ilka-tampke
