Sylvie is a girl learning healing from her mother and grandmother in Renaissance France. Her mother's skill as a healer is based on knowledge and understanding, but her grandmother can do more, to the point of being magical. When Sylvie gets her first period, her own gifts blossom, and like her grandmother there a magical twist to them--she can enter peoples minds, and tweak their memories. When her grandmother dies, Sylie can't stand to see her mother suffering in a morass of grief, and so tries to help with a bit of memory removing. It goes horribly wrong, and her mother doesn't remember her own mother, or even Sylvie.
So Sylvie sets out alone into the world to try to find another wise woman who can teach her how to use her gifts, so that she can fix what she broke, and never make such a mistake again. She is both healer and witch...and the later is a dangerous thing to be when suspicions of witchcraft can lead to death. A much younger boy, the blacksmith's son whose always getting into trouble, follows her out of their village, and refuses to be sent home, and proves to be an important part of her journey (and a nice part of the story!). A meeting with a wise woman in the nearest town sets her off to the city of Lyon, as part of a wealthy young merchant's caravan.
But neither the wise woman or the young merchant are exactly who they seem, and Sylvie's gifts place her in great danger. She must fight fiercely for her right to use her powers as healer/witch as she sees fit, figuring out how to use them ethically, and making sure she is making decisions for herself in a time and place that's often unkind to young women. There's a nice romance too-- the powerful young merchant offers to protect her by marrying her, and she declines (and figures out how to protect herself), but in the course of travelling together they start trusting each other enough to share their darkest secrets. It's a slow romance, but a sweet one.
It's not a swirling fast-paced book full of Things Happening, and indeed a lot of what happens takes place in Sylvie's head, which was fine with me! Sylvie is beautifully thoughtful and intelligent, and I appreciated her lots. There is trauma (in the young merchant's past too, from his desperate childhood as a thief "and worse") and of course in Sylvie's life--her love for her mother is unchanged though her mother doesn't know who she is. But there is healing too, and (slight spoiler) I appreciated that magic isn't the answer for this.
It's good historical fiction too, with enough of the history part (especially social and economic history) to be interesting without info dumping on the reader. My only gripe is that the blurb says this is medieval France. Not. Clearly it's Renaissance- Henry VIII is on the throne in England, and the Medici family is busily doing their Medici thing down in Italy....
short answer--I really liked it!
*note about target audience--recently there was a lot of chat on twitter from folks wanting more books for the 12-14 year old kids who are leaving middle grade (9-12 years old) but who aren't the target audience just yet for much of Young Adult. This is a book for those in-betweenish sort of readers, who want a bit of romance, who want books about independent young women (the heroine here is 15) figuring out what sort of person they want to be. This isn't a book that I'd give to a 9 or 10 year old, but I'd give it in a flash to 11-13 year old me and other dreamy kids who aren't quite ready to grow up but are enjoying starting to think about it from the safe perspective of fantasy....and I think the cover does a great job at targeting this group of readers!
disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher
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I'm glad you liked this one, and I agree with the placement with readers-- sadly, I have so few of those readers. I love Werlin's thrillers.
ReplyDeleteThis does sound lovely... 11-13 year old me would have been the perfect audience.
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