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WoGF Review: Hild by Nicola Griffith
Alix Heintzman (alixheintzman) recently earned herself a graduate degree in history from the University of Vermont, and has circled back to her Old Kentucky Home with her partner Nick Stiner. She spends her time semi-desperately repairing the abandoned house they just bought, writing history high school curriculum, and reading fantasy books. She reviews books on her blog, The Other Side of the Rain, and is a staff reviewer at Fantasy Literature.
Nicola Griffith’s Hild: A Novel is something rare. It’s a historical fantasy, but it’s not a magical adventure, a bodice-ripper, a military drama, or even a political thriller. It’s not the kind of book you dive into and finish a day later and forget almost immediately. Hild is a whole world with a taste and texture of its own. It lingers.
The story is a fictionalized (but not fantasized) vision of the early life of Hilda of Whitby, a slightly obscure 7th century English saint. The plot clings to the trailing skirts of a young girl who becomes the seer to a medieval King. Amid a sea of old English names and places (Ǽthelfrith, Ealdwulf, Caer Loid, Hwicce), Hild uses her influence and intelligence to navigate the choppy waters of politics and war. It’s a slow, beautiful story full of winter evenings by the hearth and long rides through the countryside and sudden spurts of violence. It’s simultaneously about the huge, grinding ways that cultures change, the depth and complexity of the past, and a young girl making her own way.
In the spirit of full confession, Hild is not technically fantasy. There’s no magic performed in the story. Merlin doesn’t stroll in halfway through and have a magical showdown with Morgan le Fay, and there aren’t any dragon sightings or wood sprites or Faeries spelled with an ‘e.’ Hild’s own magic as a seer is a combination of artifice, mystery, and her own fierce observational intelligence. But it does feel like fantasy, and not just because we’ve been hardwired to expect sorcery whenever we see a sword.
WoGF Review: Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
Jonathan Thornton (thrak) is a long-time science fiction and fantasy reader, but has only just started writing reviews on his blog Golden Apples of the West. Outside of reading, his interests are music and insects. His new year’s resolution is to review more of the books he has read on WWEnd and maybe finally get round to writing his own SF novel that he’s always talking about.
“And these places you go, the people you find, do you come to care for them? Or do you only study them, like strange shells you might find on the beach?”
Marguerite Angelica Taishan is sent by the Company to visit Grenchstom’s Planet, or GP, pronounced Jeep, for short. The Company, being paternalistic, militaristic and colonial, had tried to take Jeep in the past, but now the planet is in quarantine because during the Company’s previous attempt to colonise it a virus wiped out the entire male population. Nevertheless the completely female population is still flourishing and procreating. Marghe’s job is to test a new vaccine against the virus, and to try to establish a dialogue between the Mirrors, Company’s muscle, and the indigenous population. However, there is a Company warship in orbit ready to sterilise the planet if the vaccine fails, and a woman, Uaithne, from the Echraidhe tribe in the north, is spreading death and destruction through the local population.
