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