A review by eleanorfranzen
Mere by Danielle Giles

I hereby crown Mere Gay Nun Book of the Year. [some spoilers, I guess?] That sounds sarcastic and mean, but hey—we had Lauren Groff's Matrix (2021), now we've got this, this is starting to look like a subgenre. What's interesting about Mere, which otherwise has a fairly standard tussle for convent leadership at the centre of its plot, is that it takes the supernatural, and the tension between pagan worship and an imperfectly Christianised populace, seriously. It's obvious from early on that there's something inexplicable about the behaviour of people who get lost in the marsh that surrounds this East Anglian convent, something that isn't attributable to simple disorientation or the aftereffects of exposure. Those who don't die return changed, apparently able to perceive far more of the natural world around them, and able to pass that perception on to anyone who physically touches them. If Mary Stewart's Merlin novels count as fantasy—and she won the Mythopoeic Award for two of them—this certainly does too. For the most part the medieval setting is evoked effectively. There's a sensory and sensual groundedness that the best fiction of this kind has (I'm thinking of Nicola Griffith's Hild, or Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Corner That Held Them, or Stewart's Merlin novels again, or Mantel's Wolf Hall) that Mere doesn't quite have, although there are definitely extraordinarily evocative moments: the scene of the whippings administered to errant sisters on Christmas Eve, for example. The lesbian nuns feel more right than Groff's, though; it's not just about sex but also about emotional connection and intensity. Well worth picking up.