4 stars: loved this book, would recommend
This was a reread but it's been a long time - I remembered almost nothing of it. It is a work of historical fiction about the very early years of a woman about whom very little is known but who eventually became a saint.
I feel like I had an easier time reading it the first time though - I spent a lot of time rereading pages and flipping back to try and figure out what was going on. I didn't have a lot of trouble with the Old English words sprinkled throughout, most were clear from context, doubly so if you've read a lot of fantasy, and I think helped disconnect them from words with more modern connotations (e.g. a gesith is not exactly a knight), and it helped a lot that I had just played an online game set in a similar time period so I knew where all the kingdoms and so on were. But I found the names very hard to keep track of and if I read it again I would probably take notes as I go. There was also a lot that happened that was just sort of implied or that happened very subtlely and so I would need to read thing carefully to make sure I didn't miss anything.
Otherwise it very much covered two topics I love a lot: pre-modern intrigue and politics, and extremely detailed descriptions of daily life at the time. Religion mostly exists as an extension of politics in this book. Insofar as this is a book about the lives of women, it did better justice than most historical fiction: the descriptions of textile manufacture were, as far as I could tell, incredibly well researched, and there was a lot about how all of that was essential to the economics of Britain as a whole. It was also full of loving descriptions of nature and plants and animals, and how closely life at the time was tied to the seasons and the weather and how deadly those things could be. The novel felt much more deeply rooted in the time period where it was set than most vaguely medieval fiction.
There is also a lot of action, and violence, but often it happens in the background and is often not dwelled upon (aside frrom some specific very gory descriptions) and in fact there is one pivotal moment near the beginning where the protagonist is present but the events that occurred are never described directly and you have to infer what happened later. It is much more about the interior lives of people living in a very violent society and how they find ways to ensure their survival, rather than about battles and such. I will note that very few characters, including the protagonist, act in ways that are particularly aligned with modern notions of right and wrong.
I generally don't like the trope of a protagonist who is just super smart and figures everything out, and thought she was unrealistically young to be doing that, but I could forgive it in this case because of everything else. I am also at this point very unclear how the historical figure she is based on eventually became a saint.
Content notes:
I guess anything set in this time period is contractually obligated to contain incest? Also there is sexual assault though it is dealt with more carefully than a lot of books in the genre. As well as all the bad things that happened in this time period, which was early enough that slavery was widespread.
There is in fact queer content, but it still very much in line with the likely norms of pre-Christian Britain rather than modern norms, including the fact that nobles were expected to have premarital relationships only with people with a dubious ability to meaningfully consent to such relationships. It is not really a romantic novel in any imaginable definition of the term. The protagonist is seen as lying somewhere between a female and a male social role, but this role she finds herself in is itself fairly constraining and it's not entirely clear it is one she fully chose.
