REBECCA O. (sunnybrookgal) reviewed on
I was greatly looking forward to reading this book base don the teaser back cover. Unfortunately, I found it to be revisionist drivel of the worst ilk. The heroine is a peasant, yet she manages to learn to read and speak eloquently, become a skilled midwife and herbalist, speak Latin, and mine lead all in less than a year. She almost singlehandedly nurses the village and remains patient and saintly above all the chaos. In the end, backward England is too much for her and she travels to the Barbary coast, where she is welcomed and made the wife and female assistant of an Arab doctor. He, of course, is enlightened and understands her independence and need for freedom (as long as she and her daughters stay veiled so only her eyes show, insert derisive SNORT here). Aside from this comic book like PC superwoman character, what really upset me is the way in which she turned the truly good rector (she admits this herself in the afterword) of history into a, well, monster. This book offered an excellent opportunity to show how goodness, as in the case of the true rector of accurate history and his self-sacrificing wife (who had 2 children by the way and died of plague while nursing the village, and who did not have an illicit child, self-abortion via poker, torturous sexless marriage or death by the hand of a knife wielding madwoman) can exist in the face of terror and strife, and yet she chose to go down that well trodden path of sensationalism and revisionism instead. In the afterword, she notes that she took advice that historical novelists should take their history in short doses and not let it overinfluence their work! I would beg, then, that they drop the "historical" part of the genre and stick with plain fiction instead.
