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Sleeper's Castle
May. 26th, 2026 01:34 pmI've picked up a few books by Barbara Erskine over the last year, but Sleeper's Castle is both the most recent acquisition and the first I've read.
It's a timeslip novel - we follow Catrin, trying to find her way as a poet and musician in her father's shadow in the 1400s, and Andy in the present day, caretaking a friend's house and cat for a year, after the death of her partner of ten years.
What links them together is the house - Sleeper's Castle - where they both live in their respective time periods. And the magic of the house allows them to move between times, see each other's lives and at certain points interact directly.
It's well written and engaging, at least at first. I got invested in both narratives, I liked both protagonists and also the peripheral characters in both time periods.
But it's too long. It gets very repetitive in the middle - I'm pretty sure you could cut about 200 pages out of the middle and still have a perfectly valid (and more compelling) story.
The antagonist of Andy's tale is also a caricature of motiveless evil, which jarred quite a bit. Plus, while there's a hint of potential romance, that aspect kind of fizzles out and doesn't get a particularly clear resolution. And I did gradually lose interest in Catrin's story, once the focus shifted mainly to battles.
I did want to find out what happened, though, so I persevered - and I'm glad I did because I mostly enjoyed the ending. It just lost me almost completely for quite a while along the way.
It's a timeslip novel - we follow Catrin, trying to find her way as a poet and musician in her father's shadow in the 1400s, and Andy in the present day, caretaking a friend's house and cat for a year, after the death of her partner of ten years.
What links them together is the house - Sleeper's Castle - where they both live in their respective time periods. And the magic of the house allows them to move between times, see each other's lives and at certain points interact directly.
It's well written and engaging, at least at first. I got invested in both narratives, I liked both protagonists and also the peripheral characters in both time periods.
But it's too long. It gets very repetitive in the middle - I'm pretty sure you could cut about 200 pages out of the middle and still have a perfectly valid (and more compelling) story.
The antagonist of Andy's tale is also a caricature of motiveless evil, which jarred quite a bit. Plus, while there's a hint of potential romance, that aspect kind of fizzles out and doesn't get a particularly clear resolution. And I did gradually lose interest in Catrin's story, once the focus shifted mainly to battles.
I did want to find out what happened, though, so I persevered - and I'm glad I did because I mostly enjoyed the ending. It just lost me almost completely for quite a while along the way.
