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mohawkm's review
4.0
Very silly and yet as others have noted, painstakingly done. Somehow reminds one of Drunk History as well.
cesspool_princess's review
5.0
incredible, i hate that i kept saying "yooo this reminds me of berserk" every 10 seconds tho, amazing illustration with the embroidery and cloth motif, great use of the medium and playing with its/ breaking free of its constraints in intentional and thematically consistent ways, obviously excellent choice of content/ story, excellent
600bars's review
5.0
I had to read this through 2.5 times to fully understand it but once I did I loved it. I read it through once on my own but was not paying careful attention to the timeline so I was not noticing what was a flashback and what was happening to Mary vs to Frau Troffea. The characters all look similar so that has something to do with it.
When I read Matrix by Lauren Groff, which is set about 400 years before the events of this book, I wondered why it is that some women get to be seen as holy mystics with visions from Jesus, and some women who have the same visions get called devil witches. It probably has to do with the perceived morality of the woman in question and the general climate of her community. Mary insisted her visions were heavenly, but no one believed her. This book did a wonderful job exploring how terrified people are of women stepping out of line, the fear of women’s sexuality becoming unbridled and out of control, the horror of the monstrous mother! I also learned about mother Jesus. The book itself is stunning and I am obsessed with the embroidered celestial/cthonic beings that can permeate the boundaries of the panels. Embroidery is a traditionally feminine art form. Many “feminine” art forms like textiles are devalued and seen as crafts instead of ~art~. I love when women go Berserk / Feral and the sky falls down like when Eva 01 goes berserk or the end of Carrie. The form and story worked so well together. Fantastic, creative, never seen anything like it, etc etc.
The intro makes mention of the Covid plague, but I felt the modern day pertinence had more to do with the right wing terror of boundary dissolution. The desire to enforce stricter laws/rules around women’s control over their own bodies, all the anti trans legislation, the “save the children” moral panic that is well underway, at least in the US. Everyone's brains are scrambling.
The main reason I write reviews is that they really help me remember what I read, and sometimes if something was confusing I write out a whole summary to make sure I got everything, so the rest of this is just a summary.
I started reading this out loud with Kai, but we put it down for like a month and then forgot so we started over at the beginning again. This time I actually kept track of what was happening. Mary is a mother and long-suffering wife in 1518. Since her childhood she’s had holy visions. There was a flashback that was basically the plot of The VVitch. Her father tried to kill her and dump her in the river. She stayed submerged for several days and Jesus saved her. She emerged a bride of christ and joined a convent. The clergy throughout this story are corrupt and committing the 7 deadly sins any chance they get. Mary’s visions get her into trouble in the convent. She has one friend named Agatha who believes these visions are from God, but everyone else seems to think the visions are from the Devil. Mary gets locked in a cell at the abbey. She’s told that it’s for “solitary contemplation” or whatever but it’s clearly imprisonment. Lucky for Mary the lord is on her side so she turns into a bird and flies out the window. She tries to go back home. Her family is understandably spooked, because to their knowledge she drowned in the river years before. Honestly, I can’t blame the family. If I were a peasant farmer in 1518 and I killed my beloved daughter because she was possessed by demons, and then a few years went by and she showed up on my doorstep very much alive, my belief in the devil would be completely vindicated. They make her sleep in the pig pen smh. Eventually, her family arranges a marriage for her so that she’ll have somewhere to go, because they don’t want her under their roof. Her husband is a drunkard loser and he sucks. Mary continues life as a housewife/mother. One day she runs into her old friend Agatha from the convent. Agatha has also left the convent because of some shady business there. (we know the clergy is corrupt, but we later find out that after Mary escaped everyone went crazy and the nuns started trying to drown themselves etc. Again, I can’t blame everyone for freaking out when the girl they think is having Devil Visions disappears from a stone cell.) Mary tells Agatha she’s still having her visions but has no one to talk to. Agatha says she has a confessor she’s been loving, so Mary starts meeting with Father Puttock. He says that they’ll both do some rituals so she can be free from the visions. He tells her she’s not allowed to have sex with her evil husband to which Mary is like oh noooo I’m sooooo upset about that lol. Father Puttock will help out by doing his own suffering project of sleeping cold and naked on a stone floor. God loves to see his children Suffer I guess. However, that night Mary visits Father Puttock in the form of a succubus and fucks him. This bitch is an absolute Demonette in the sack, literally!
Mary’s whole backstory is interspersed with an account of the Dancing plague of 1518. A woman named Frau Troffea starts dancing one day and can’t stop. The dancing is contagious and people don’t stop dancing until their feet bleed or they die of exhaustion. Mary’s husband and children get caught up in the fuss. To everyone else the dancing looks like dancing, but Mary is able to see the demons devils & angels moving everyone’s limbs. The most striking aspect of this book is that all the earthly aspects of the book are drawn in pencil/ink, but the angels and demons and occasionally Mary are **EMBROIDERED** in bright colorful threads. The demons/angels are also allowed to exist outside of the panels anywhere on the page while the earthly beings are constrained to their boxes. The pages themselves look like cloth and are occasionally burned. After the Succubus situation, the timelines converge. The dancers, who have been dancing in the town square for maybe a month at this point, are carted (literally in those plague body carts) to a shrine in hopes that the holiness of the area will cure the dancing once and for all. They all get little red booties. During the latter quarter of this book all hell breaks loose and we have an epic Demonic/Angelic/dancing LCL soup that reaches End of Evangelion proportions. After everyone calms down, Mary returns to town. The town is eerily quiet. She still hasn’t found her children. She goes to Father Puttock again. She tries to tell him that her visions are from Jesus but he obviously is like Bitch you’re nothing but a disgusting Eve you Women all have the Devil in you!!! Mary despairs and jumps into the fireplace. We see her burn up and the story ends. But we know that she was able to survive a drowning and escape a stone room, so we the reader know that Jesus will not allow her to die so easily.
The epilogue is 10 years later. A scholar has been commissioned to write an account of what happened. Of course, he only interviews “learned men” to get a narrative. His explanation is basically that the “whores” of the city were up to no good and weak men followed. The scholar’s assistant is like “hey I found this woman who wanted to be interviewed, seems like she knows a lot about what happened….” and the scholar says “No doubt this hag was one of those original harlots. Think you my understanding will be clearer for speaking with her? Mark me well. The understanding of men can only be CORRUPTED by the words of women!” Who records the history and who is allowed to speak? How does that impact the stories that survive into the future?
When I read Matrix by Lauren Groff, which is set about 400 years before the events of this book, I wondered why it is that some women get to be seen as holy mystics with visions from Jesus, and some women who have the same visions get called devil witches. It probably has to do with the perceived morality of the woman in question and the general climate of her community. Mary insisted her visions were heavenly, but no one believed her. This book did a wonderful job exploring how terrified people are of women stepping out of line, the fear of women’s sexuality becoming unbridled and out of control, the horror of the monstrous mother! I also learned about mother Jesus. The book itself is stunning and I am obsessed with the embroidered celestial/cthonic beings that can permeate the boundaries of the panels. Embroidery is a traditionally feminine art form. Many “feminine” art forms like textiles are devalued and seen as crafts instead of ~art~. I love when women go Berserk / Feral and the sky falls down like when Eva 01 goes berserk or the end of Carrie. The form and story worked so well together. Fantastic, creative, never seen anything like it, etc etc.
The intro makes mention of the Covid plague, but I felt the modern day pertinence had more to do with the right wing terror of boundary dissolution. The desire to enforce stricter laws/rules around women’s control over their own bodies, all the anti trans legislation, the “save the children” moral panic that is well underway, at least in the US. Everyone's brains are scrambling.
The main reason I write reviews is that they really help me remember what I read, and sometimes if something was confusing I write out a whole summary to make sure I got everything, so the rest of this is just a summary.
I started reading this out loud with Kai, but we put it down for like a month and then forgot so we started over at the beginning again. This time I actually kept track of what was happening. Mary is a mother and long-suffering wife in 1518. Since her childhood she’s had holy visions. There was a flashback that was basically the plot of The VVitch. Her father tried to kill her and dump her in the river. She stayed submerged for several days and Jesus saved her. She emerged a bride of christ and joined a convent. The clergy throughout this story are corrupt and committing the 7 deadly sins any chance they get. Mary’s visions get her into trouble in the convent. She has one friend named Agatha who believes these visions are from God, but everyone else seems to think the visions are from the Devil. Mary gets locked in a cell at the abbey. She’s told that it’s for “solitary contemplation” or whatever but it’s clearly imprisonment. Lucky for Mary the lord is on her side so she turns into a bird and flies out the window. She tries to go back home. Her family is understandably spooked, because to their knowledge she drowned in the river years before. Honestly, I can’t blame the family. If I were a peasant farmer in 1518 and I killed my beloved daughter because she was possessed by demons, and then a few years went by and she showed up on my doorstep very much alive, my belief in the devil would be completely vindicated. They make her sleep in the pig pen smh. Eventually, her family arranges a marriage for her so that she’ll have somewhere to go, because they don’t want her under their roof. Her husband is a drunkard loser and he sucks. Mary continues life as a housewife/mother. One day she runs into her old friend Agatha from the convent. Agatha has also left the convent because of some shady business there. (we know the clergy is corrupt, but we later find out that after Mary escaped everyone went crazy and the nuns started trying to drown themselves etc. Again, I can’t blame everyone for freaking out when the girl they think is having Devil Visions disappears from a stone cell.) Mary tells Agatha she’s still having her visions but has no one to talk to. Agatha says she has a confessor she’s been loving, so Mary starts meeting with Father Puttock. He says that they’ll both do some rituals so she can be free from the visions. He tells her she’s not allowed to have sex with her evil husband to which Mary is like oh noooo I’m sooooo upset about that lol. Father Puttock will help out by doing his own suffering project of sleeping cold and naked on a stone floor. God loves to see his children Suffer I guess. However, that night Mary visits Father Puttock in the form of a succubus and fucks him. This bitch is an absolute Demonette in the sack, literally!
Mary’s whole backstory is interspersed with an account of the Dancing plague of 1518. A woman named Frau Troffea starts dancing one day and can’t stop. The dancing is contagious and people don’t stop dancing until their feet bleed or they die of exhaustion. Mary’s husband and children get caught up in the fuss. To everyone else the dancing looks like dancing, but Mary is able to see the demons devils & angels moving everyone’s limbs. The most striking aspect of this book is that all the earthly aspects of the book are drawn in pencil/ink, but the angels and demons and occasionally Mary are **EMBROIDERED** in bright colorful threads. The demons/angels are also allowed to exist outside of the panels anywhere on the page while the earthly beings are constrained to their boxes. The pages themselves look like cloth and are occasionally burned. After the Succubus situation, the timelines converge. The dancers, who have been dancing in the town square for maybe a month at this point, are carted (literally in those plague body carts) to a shrine in hopes that the holiness of the area will cure the dancing once and for all. They all get little red booties. During the latter quarter of this book all hell breaks loose and we have an epic Demonic/Angelic/dancing LCL soup that reaches End of Evangelion proportions. After everyone calms down, Mary returns to town. The town is eerily quiet. She still hasn’t found her children. She goes to Father Puttock again. She tries to tell him that her visions are from Jesus but he obviously is like Bitch you’re nothing but a disgusting Eve you Women all have the Devil in you!!! Mary despairs and jumps into the fireplace. We see her burn up and the story ends. But we know that she was able to survive a drowning and escape a stone room, so we the reader know that Jesus will not allow her to die so easily.
The epilogue is 10 years later. A scholar has been commissioned to write an account of what happened. Of course, he only interviews “learned men” to get a narrative. His explanation is basically that the “whores” of the city were up to no good and weak men followed. The scholar’s assistant is like “hey I found this woman who wanted to be interviewed, seems like she knows a lot about what happened….” and the scholar says “No doubt this hag was one of those original harlots. Think you my understanding will be clearer for speaking with her? Mark me well. The understanding of men can only be CORRUPTED by the words of women!” Who records the history and who is allowed to speak? How does that impact the stories that survive into the future?
rita0nthemoon's review
5.0
Eu estou absolutamente embasbacada com a ilustração, feita à mão na íntegra, através de processos de bordados e pirografia.
A história é também muito bonita e imersiva.
Absolutamente devorei este livro assim que i tive nas mãos.
A história é também muito bonita e imersiva.
Absolutamente devorei este livro assim que i tive nas mãos.