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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.

This may be my own categorization, but there sure have been a lot of books recently that are written in an interconnected mosaic structure. When reading one of these, my brain goes into a similar mode as a good mystery novel, but instead of pinning suspicious plot elements to my cork board, I'm instead sifting out small fragments of imagery and theme. It's not unlike the feeling when you see a lot of online posts talking indirectly about the same current event, while you are uninformed and trying to feel out the shape of the subject from only its subtooted outline.

I start with this context because I have read a lot of these mosaic books lately, and it's tricky for me to distill my feelings about this book without making direct comparisons. Primarily, Remember You Will Die suffers from coming in the immediate shadow of the emotional punches of Rakesfall and In Universes (both of which were winners of the 2024 Otherwise Award). How High We Go in the Dark from 2022 also sits in this mosaic space and casts its own long shadow, especially given that I think it is a stronger thematic treatment of adjacent ideas.

Remember You Will Die is a book told (largely) through obituaries ranging from a mildly speculative version of our past and into a very science fiction speculative future. However, it also has some additional texts from etymology and web searches. Broadly, it's about death, art, and meaning but it's also about AIs, invasive species, and parenthood.

Nerds of a Feather has a much better review that is an incomplete list of recurring motifs found in the novel. Its text is almost more of a compelling piece than the novel itself, and I highly recommend reading it instead of my own blabs.

What this book suffers the most from is its choice of form: the obituary format. To its credit, it is hard to imagine it doing better, and many bits are quite compelling little narratives. What doesn't work is that an obituary is largely detached observation of the legacy of a person's life. You get the shape of a person but at an emotional distance. It feels impersonal, and when the obituary quotes something the deceased has said, it often feels jarringly like the author trying to directly tell the reader something. This obituary structure thus becomes both too subtle and not subtle enough simultaneously.

There is an immediate story in the connective tissue of this novel about an overprotective parent and a child's escape from their smothering grasp. But, in the end I am left with only the outlines of these characters and very little of their heart; ultimately it makes the whole novel seem shallow and hollow when it feels like it should instead be the core.

The condition of living is eventually leaving.

Endings are an outline, a frame, a shape. An unfinished painting hangs nowhere.