An Uncertain Choice

1.5 stars, rounded down for annoyance.

It's billed as a historical fiction and shelved as fantasy at the bookstore. The content reflects this interesting dichotomy and the book continues to shift between the two unpredictably. Date is 1390 and location is England. The fantasy comes in a fictional vow based on a magical relic, Tears of Mary, which supposedly is peddled by the local church and is recognized as a binding promise by all involved (though consequences for breaking it are never spelled out).

This of course is to focus on the forcing the heroine into a false crisis so that she has a motive to have to love and marry in under 30 days. (I would posit that there were plenty of other more believable ways to get her into that situation, but oh well.)

Anyway, the religion thing is really badly done. 1390 England was, of course, pre-Henry VIII, so any “abbot” would be Catholic. However, the religion is a weird mish-mash of Catholic and Protestant and it doesn't match any known system of religion out there. The “abbot” is over not only the nunnery but also the entire town, and is seen as their religious leader. I checked with my Catholic friend and in no case would the abbot be hearing the confessions and providing religious leadership for the town at large; that would require a priest, called “father” instead of “abbot.” The abbot would not be the lone leader of a nunnery but would be joined in leadership by an abbess. Nuns were required to renounce their property to the church when they went through the acceptance, and she wouldn't have been put through the ceremony right off without having completed a novitiate. She would not speak too-familiar prayers directly to God as that was seen as effrontery and the business of priests, and she most definitely wouldn't do it while fingering prayer beads that are elsewhere referred to as her rosary. She has no patron saints and no prayer book. No one in the book ever attends mass, though they do go to confession.

Another huge mess is the whole part about her having “charge” of her estate as a minor female. English nobility would have made sure the estate was under a guardianship because any girl with only a handful of retainers (who apparently aren't faithful to her anyway) lays the country open to invasion (Hundred Years War is currently raging in Europe and so on). Majority wasn't at 18 but at 21. If the sheriff was flouting her commands, all she had to do was send a letter to her guardian and the guy would be executed for his actions (torture was banned almost a century before). It wouldn't go on unchecked for four years, and there definitely wouldn't be only one young noble who cared to stop it. “The English civil and ecclesiastical authorities were reluctant to employ torture; they saw it as antithetical to their system of justice and an intrusion by continental law—an attempt to undermine English autonomy under papal and French authority.”—from “Arthurian Literature XXXII” by Elizabeth Archibald, referring to even a political application of torture in 1308.

And yet we get treated to several gratuitous descriptions of hard-core torture in public settings, right out for the eye to see, which take place regularly over the course of several years, and yet somehow word never reaches the king or even the noble neighbors? And her estate is so lawless that it tries to assault the good guys too?

The relationship part isn't even well done. They're instantly ready to think the worst of each other and they also spend long lengths of time alone together as she courts each guy (though of course you know from page 1 the one she's going to pick). Hot and cold? I know it's a teen book, but this love/hate/love thing is a bit strong even for that.

So, yeah...don't recommend.

Historically inaccurate plus with stomach-turning violence. (Comparable to the tortures described in “The Laughing Man” by Victor Hugo, though in that book it's clear that the tortures aren't mainstream and are handed out by a sort of deep-state group.)

Content: violence