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3.75 AVERAGE
3.75 AVERAGE
kblincoln's review against another edition
4.0
Sometimes reading multiple books at the same time burns you out, sometimes there are serendipitous overlaps between themes. I have come to accept that much of any review is solidly based in the reading environment in which I have encountered that book.
I am encountering Armed in Her Fashion in the context of some feminist theory books and podcasts. And so the collection of women who form the main ensemble of this cast appealed to me as embodying many of the issues I was hearing about in the other books.
We have Margriet, who is a dying widow just trying to get back what is legally hers under Flemish law, her daughter Beatrix who truly loved her husband but is devastated by the practical reality of being without him, Jacquemine who must protect her children while still offering help to her sisterhood of refugees, and Claude, who is a man in a woman's body offered the potential to change his form physically.
And, of course, the Chatelaine, who has risen out of the ground in the very mouth of a Hellbeast and who takes men & women and forges them into chimerae to fight her battles. There is much unplumbed backstory in her character-- she lets on that she as locked her husband (commander of the hellbeast) away in an oubliette and intimates he is much worse than she!
Heartfield brings a medieval Bruges to life, complete with crazy medieval theories about religion and grotesque consequences (such as Bruges' soldiers being made into revenants by the Chatelaine and sent back to Bruges at nightfall calling the names of their loved ones...who if they accept the revanants into their houses, fall dead to a plague.)
It was viscerally brought home to me the limited resources and recourses women of that time had to make their way if they were unattached to a man. Even the powerful Chatelaine must make nice with Kings in order to have enough power to attack Bruges.
The book definitely has a somewhat dry and historical tone throughout. There is a lot of planning and going over plans that sometimes slowed the pace of the book at points, but I definitely think its an interesting mix of history, the fantastic, and looking at how women must sometimes resort to incredible lengths to make their way in a chaotic world.
I am encountering Armed in Her Fashion in the context of some feminist theory books and podcasts. And so the collection of women who form the main ensemble of this cast appealed to me as embodying many of the issues I was hearing about in the other books.
We have Margriet, who is a dying widow just trying to get back what is legally hers under Flemish law, her daughter Beatrix who truly loved her husband but is devastated by the practical reality of being without him, Jacquemine who must protect her children while still offering help to her sisterhood of refugees, and Claude, who is a man in a woman's body offered the potential to change his form physically.
And, of course, the Chatelaine, who has risen out of the ground in the very mouth of a Hellbeast and who takes men & women and forges them into chimerae to fight her battles. There is much unplumbed backstory in her character-- she lets on that she as locked her husband (commander of the hellbeast) away in an oubliette and intimates he is much worse than she!
Heartfield brings a medieval Bruges to life, complete with crazy medieval theories about religion and grotesque consequences (such as Bruges' soldiers being made into revenants by the Chatelaine and sent back to Bruges at nightfall calling the names of their loved ones...who if they accept the revanants into their houses, fall dead to a plague.)
It was viscerally brought home to me the limited resources and recourses women of that time had to make their way if they were unattached to a man. Even the powerful Chatelaine must make nice with Kings in order to have enough power to attack Bruges.
The book definitely has a somewhat dry and historical tone throughout. There is a lot of planning and going over plans that sometimes slowed the pace of the book at points, but I definitely think its an interesting mix of history, the fantastic, and looking at how women must sometimes resort to incredible lengths to make their way in a chaotic world.
koalammas's review against another edition
adventurous
funny
informative
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.75
anbar's review against another edition
2.0
A surreal fever-dream of a story that dragged a lot in the middle, had too much going on, and just didn't connect with me despite so many things (atypical medieval setting! Medieval women fighting the system! Racial & gender minority characters in prominent roles!) that should have made this an easy like.
Hell has surfaced in medieval Flanders--or at least, a giant creature people call Hell, controlled by the Chatelaine who managed to lock away its original master, her husband, somewhere in its bowels and brought Hell (the beast) to the surface wanting to earn lands for herself, thinking if she lent her powers to the King of France he would grant her a duchy. The beast contains forges that can fuse living people with animals or machines to form chimeras, and poison spines that can sting people and cause them to become revenants - kind of like zombies, but not mindless cannibals: they're washed-out, speaking versions of their living selves who wander the land looking for their loved ones and trying to get them to invite them in, at which point these loved ones become infected with a non-contagious Plague that slowly kills them. But with all the misery around, some people also get something called the Grief, which as near as I could tell is a kind of depression that, I don't know, either also slowly kills them or lures them to Hell...? The whole Plague vs Grief thing was unclear to me.
Setting aside the above confusion, the main plot follows Margaret, a sharp-tempered wet-nurse angry at her no-good husband who went to war with son-in-law and didn't come back...until he returns a revenant, to drag off his secret stash of wealth he'd kept secret from her through all their supposed hard times (oh HELL no! Margaret wants that back to ensure her daughter's future!); and Claude, a trans man (before there was language to describe or understand that) who had been a mercenary until he was injured and woke up dressed in women's clothing by rescuers determined to correct this impropriety, and now just wants to get away so he can go back to wearing pants (and recover a weapon he stole from the Chatelaine, which she is determined to recover). Modern readers, unlike the other characters, will understand Claude's situation and the sting of even friends constantly misgendering him and just not understanding ("Why do you pretend to be a man?").
Margaret and Claude's stories should have kept me interested, but there was too much going on, added to the confusingly nebulous nature of the hell-beast and the Plague/Grief. It's weird that everyone would somehow seemingly easily accept Hell as a creature, not a place (one would expect heated disagreement on that!), that no-one would bat an eye about the King employing supposed-Hell in his service (???), and that when your dead husband makes off with you daughter's inheritance your first logical (?!?) decision is to go to the Queen of Hell to demand his overlord (the Queen OF HELL) make her vassal hand it over as per inheritance law, and no-one bats an eye at that either (except to think 'pretty shrewish'; NOT 'how utterly insane to treat HELL, a fount of evil, like a regular feudal court').
Added side-annoyance: the author doesn't point out until literally halfway through the book that the Chatelaine is black and Margaret's employer is also half-Moor, so readers have to stop everything and rewrite their entire mental image of these women 200-300 pages in (they mention 'dark skin' a few times in passing, but are we talking Mediterranean olive? Silk Road tan? Specify at the time we're first forming out mental image!!!). It makes perfect historical sense for there to be black characters, considering the Moors is Spain, contact with Egypt and the Middle East through the Crusades, and human migration, but if you have a visible minority character and you want to spell them out as such, DO IT ON THEIR FIRST PAGE so you don't annoy the heck out of your readers!
Disappointingly not my cup of tea.
Hell has surfaced in medieval Flanders--or at least, a giant creature people call Hell, controlled by the Chatelaine who managed to lock away its original master, her husband, somewhere in its bowels and brought Hell (the beast) to the surface wanting to earn lands for herself, thinking if she lent her powers to the King of France he would grant her a duchy. The beast contains forges that can fuse living people with animals or machines to form chimeras, and poison spines that can sting people and cause them to become revenants - kind of like zombies, but not mindless cannibals: they're washed-out, speaking versions of their living selves who wander the land looking for their loved ones and trying to get them to invite them in, at which point these loved ones become infected with a non-contagious Plague that slowly kills them. But with all the misery around, some people also get something called the Grief, which as near as I could tell is a kind of depression that, I don't know, either also slowly kills them or lures them to Hell...? The whole Plague vs Grief thing was unclear to me.
Setting aside the above confusion, the main plot follows Margaret, a sharp-tempered wet-nurse angry at her no-good husband who went to war with son-in-law and didn't come back...until he returns a revenant, to drag off his secret stash of wealth he'd kept secret from her through all their supposed hard times (oh HELL no! Margaret wants that back to ensure her daughter's future!); and Claude, a trans man (before there was language to describe or understand that) who had been a mercenary until he was injured and woke up dressed in women's clothing by rescuers determined to correct this impropriety, and now just wants to get away so he can go back to wearing pants (and recover a weapon he stole from the Chatelaine, which she is determined to recover). Modern readers, unlike the other characters, will understand Claude's situation and the sting of even friends constantly misgendering him and just not understanding ("Why do you pretend to be a man?").
Margaret and Claude's stories should have kept me interested, but there was too much going on, added to the confusingly nebulous nature of the hell-beast and the Plague/Grief. It's weird that everyone would somehow seemingly easily accept Hell as a creature, not a place (one would expect heated disagreement on that!), that no-one would bat an eye about the King employing supposed-Hell in his service (???), and that when your dead husband makes off with you daughter's inheritance your first logical (?!?) decision is to go to the Queen of Hell to demand his overlord (the Queen OF HELL) make her vassal hand it over as per inheritance law, and no-one bats an eye at that either (except to think 'pretty shrewish'; NOT 'how utterly insane to treat HELL, a fount of evil, like a regular feudal court').
Added side-annoyance: the author doesn't point out until literally halfway through the book that the Chatelaine is black and Margaret's employer is also half-Moor, so readers have to stop everything and rewrite their entire mental image of these women 200-300 pages in (they mention 'dark skin' a few times in passing, but are we talking Mediterranean olive? Silk Road tan? Specify at the time we're first forming out mental image!!!). It makes perfect historical sense for there to be black characters, considering the Moors is Spain, contact with Egypt and the Middle East through the Crusades, and human migration, but if you have a visible minority character and you want to spell them out as such, DO IT ON THEIR FIRST PAGE so you don't annoy the heck out of your readers!
Disappointingly not my cup of tea.
thescienceofcurls's review
adventurous
dark
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Complicated
5.0
zazzeaux's review against another edition
5.0
Heartfield pulls off a neat trick in this engaging story. She manages to write empowered female characters with agency while remaining true to the historical setting of the time period. These aren’t your typical damsels in distress waiting in towers for their heroes to rescue them. But neither are they feminine analogs of the classic hero trope (save for one). Further, this isn’t done at the price of emasculating or cuckolding the male characters, who are simply unfortunate pawns of the forces of competing political machines. The fantastical element is woven through the narrative naturally, and the reader has the sense that this terrifying state of affairs is both fantastic yet commonplace to the people inhabiting it. I’m no expert on 14th Century Bruges, and have no idea how much research the author did, but the details feel accurate, at least to the point that they aren’t blatantly anachronistic or out of place. This is a quick and interesting read and I highly recommend it.
I received an advanced kindle reading copy from Edelweiss, but my opinions are my own.
I received an advanced kindle reading copy from Edelweiss, but my opinions are my own.
bfls's review against another edition
4.0
Intriguing tale of 5 women each armed in their fashion, trying to make the best life for themselves. A fascinating mix of SF, horror and historical fiction.
kristinaarike's review
adventurous
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Complicated
4.5
duchess's review against another edition
4.0
3.5 stars. 14th century Belgium is not a time I think about often, and certainly not on the relatively granular scale presented in this book, but it was fun! A cast of predominantly women going up against revenants and chimeras and Hell on earth.
Doubly fun to read a book by a local Ottawa author! Fantastical historical fiction is always a blast, even slower-paced versions like this one.
Doubly fun to read a book by a local Ottawa author! Fantastical historical fiction is always a blast, even slower-paced versions like this one.