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A review by kblincoln
Armed in Her Fashion by Kate Heartfield
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.