The Familiars
Jul. 22nd, 2023 10:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearThe Familiars by Stacey Halls is the story of Fleetwood Shuttleworth, a young wife in 1612, who is going through her fourth pregnancy at the age of 17, after having lost the previous three babies.
She forms a relationship with a local girl who has midwifery experience, but things grow complicated when she discovers a terrible betrayal by her husband, and both young women get caught up in the local witch trials.
The setting is vivid and clearly well-researched, but the restrictions it places on the protagonist do mean the book gets rather repetitive in the second half and Fleetwood sometimes comes across as petulant and whiny. I absolutely understand that she has very little agency because of the time period she lives in (and this is very much part of the message of the book), and what she does manage to accomplish by the end of the book is remarkable - but it did make the middle section drag a bit for me.
And then the ultimate climax happens off-page, while Fleetwood is incapacitate and is reported to both her and the reader after the fact... Which rather diminishes the tension...
Ah well, the book is generally well written and has a lot of interesting things to say about how women were treated in the 1600s.
She forms a relationship with a local girl who has midwifery experience, but things grow complicated when she discovers a terrible betrayal by her husband, and both young women get caught up in the local witch trials.
The setting is vivid and clearly well-researched, but the restrictions it places on the protagonist do mean the book gets rather repetitive in the second half and Fleetwood sometimes comes across as petulant and whiny. I absolutely understand that she has very little agency because of the time period she lives in (and this is very much part of the message of the book), and what she does manage to accomplish by the end of the book is remarkable - but it did make the middle section drag a bit for me.
And then the ultimate climax happens off-page, while Fleetwood is incapacitate and is reported to both her and the reader after the fact... Which rather diminishes the tension...
Ah well, the book is generally well written and has a lot of interesting things to say about how women were treated in the 1600s.
