A review by ravenbait
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

5.0

This is a book about love, set against a backdrop of the Enlightenment, at a time when science and faith were trying to learn how to get along together. In Victorian England, a village is beset with fear and superstitious horror of a barely-glimpsed monster that everyone is sure brings doom and death in its claws. Cora Seaborne, recently escaped from a cruel life as an involuntary slave to a domineering husband, arrives looking for paleontological explanations and instead finds new ways looking at herself, at love, at the people who remain in her life and those more recently arrived in it. She is a scientist by inclination and a feminist by action; Will Ransome, the local parson, is a happily-married, somewhat conservative man of faith who finds in her something he did not even know he was missing.

The prose is both stark and lyrical, the sense of place woven with delicacy and strength. Shades of Folk Horror hang in the corners, which certain scenes reminding me of "Picnic at Hanging Rock". The characters are well-developed, complex, believable, and fully in charge of the story, which I love.

On the strength of this, I will definitely be picking up Perry's other novel. I found her writing a delight.