Loved it! What a completely original coming of age story! So many emotions stirred with each chapter

A lovely and enveloping historical fiction. Totally worth the read for anyone looking for historical fiction reading!

I'm just a liminal girl in a liminal manor house in the moorlands.

Charlotte is kept sheltered from the world due to a mysterious medical condition. She sees a few servants and her brilliant but reclusive scientist father. The introduction of few strangers into Charlotte's life ultimately lead to the end of her isolation. Charlotte has bigger dreams than being a wife, she wants to be a scientist like her father but education for women is not common and difficulties arise due to "her condition." I have to say that I thought I knew where this story was going, but I did not. It surprised me more than once.

The story alternates between Charlotte's and back in time to her parents courtship and their marriage. This is a story that tells very epic stories through the eyes of a few characters. The writing is beautiful and evocative. I felt like I was in the moors with the characters. It is unsurprising that there is a little vein of magic and folklore throughout. It felt like an organic and intrinsic part of the story. There are plenty of parts that horrify and enrage. The world was not kind to women in this time and place. The ending was gentler than I was expecting and I'm really glad for it. I was anticipating having my heart ripped out but instead found it positive and life affirming. This book made me feel all the feels and left me pleased and not gutted.

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada, Knopf Canada for providing an Electronic Advance Reader Copy via NetGalley for review.

This book is very well written and very well researched and the moorland setting is beautifully described. Charlotte is quite the character and when cultural confines are placed on her as a young woman, you can feel her betrayal through the pages.

However, I did not finish the book due to my own issues and not that of the author. Had I done some research ahead of time about the book I would not have requested an early copy as I struggle with the historical fiction genre.

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for an early copy in exchange for an honest review.

Beautiful, creative and mystical story of an insatiably curious girl finding her place in her family and the world. Deeply touching and brimming with lyrical prose. This is a book to lose yourself in.

I fell in love with Charlotte and her insatiable need for knowledge and her joy of learning science. I have never read about VanLeunenhoek in a non-science text before so that was exciting for me.

Such a lovely book, that I feel fans and non-fans of MacDonald will love!

I read Fall on Your Knees in High School as a part of a literature circle and I'll never forget how much we all loved it. Anyone who enjoyed that book will likely enjoy Fayne as well. It' long but incredibly propulsive and tender. I recommend switching back and forth between reading and audio as the narration by Anne-Marie MacDonald is superb.

I loved this book. It was probably one of my favourite books I read this year. It was long but not tedious. I found it interesting throughout. I was surprised at some of the revelations and the path it took. The characters were sympathetic in my opinion. I could relate to each of them in different ways. Ann Marie McDonald is a fabulous writer and I love all the works of hers that I have read. I loved the atmospheric setting the historic aspects and the character of Charlotte /Charles. This book addresses moral themes of acceptance, love, identity and the power of self belief. It drew me in and made me feel the emotions of the characters and the world they inhabited.

Another amazing offering from Anne Marie MacDonald. Thank you so much for the opportunity to read this in advance - MacDonald never disappoints!

RATING: 4 STARS
2022; Penguin Random House Canada/Knopf Canada

I started Fayne before bed on New Year's Day, and just finished it now January 2. I mention this as this book is 31 hours (700-something pages). Yesterday, I tried to spend any time I could listening to this engrossing novel. This morning as I was doing some non-day job work, I decided to spend the day with, or is it in, Fayne. MacDonald delivered with this epic gorgeous story. Fayne is a difficult novel to explain other than to say it is a historical fiction that has you abandoning on guessing what will come next and just enjoy the very deliciously descriptive novel. It has this eeriness like a gothic novel, that provided a bit of suspense, even when you know what's happening. I was on the fence with Charlotte, the protagonist, as she could be tiresome but I was completely invested in her and her story - as well as the others in the novel. The characters were so realistic, at times I felt genuine affection or dislike with them. You know it's a good story when I start talking back to the book. There was a character I was empathizing with, but then soon find out they were self serving, and felt betrayal. I am definitely a dramatic reader. I would recommend if you read this one, you have a weekend free as it's one that I think will transport you. There is so much I want to say about this novel, but are spoilers, so if anyone wants to chat about this, let me know.

***I received a complimentary copy of this ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own.***

Unfortunately this book was not for me :( I absolutely love AMM and all her writing, so I was very excited for this book, but it was so different than all her other work. I found it very hard to get into and did not end up finishing.

3.5 stars. Thank you Netgalley for an ARC though I read the book itself because the ARC wouldn't download for me.

This book is a big, slow burn, but whenever I sat down long enough to read a big chunk I fell under its spell. At times, I spoke out loud, angry at how the main characters were being treated and fascinated by how much (and how little) changes in 130 years. If nothing else, this makes me want to get to the British Isles some day to see the landscape that is its own character in this novel.

Set in Edinburgh and in the Scottish countryside, on an estate situated on a section of “disputed” border between Scotland and England, this big, compelling novel about a young woman and damning family secrets kept me reading late into the night.

It was so easy to get lost in this story of fortune-hunting, marriage, heir-getting, women labelled mad and incarcerated on the flimsiest of excuses, foggy moors and bogs, myths and legends, and identity….for fear of spoiling this story about the magnetic main character Charlotte, I won’t give anything else away.

The massive book grabbed from its opening, and pulled me along, desperate to know what would happen next to the irresistible characters, none more so than the irrepressible, ebullient and ever curious Charlotte, whom I fell in love with immediately.

This was such an entertaining book!

Thank you to Netgalley and to Penguin Random House Canada for this ARC in exchange for my review.

Absolutely gorgeous. Not what I expected, but I never have a bad time when I pick up a book by Ann-Marie MacDonald. She has solidified herself as one of my favourite authors since Fall on Your Knees. The language is difficult, it takes you a moment to warm up to it and for those who are expecting the tumultuous family dynamics of Fall on your Knees... this is not it.

However, all the beauty is there both in the prose and in some of the characters themselves. It's so easy to let yourself get drawn into the world that Ann-Marie MacDonald lays out for us. Close your eyes and let yourself be transported to another world with one of the best reads of 2022.

Not even halfway through the book, I made sure to buy my copy. It's gorgeous and sweeping and hits all the right notes.

Engaging story set in the late 1800s, mostly in Edinburgh and on a Scottish/English estate, Fayne. Fayne exists in “disputed counties” on the borderlands between England and Scotland, and the title of the Baron whose seat it is is 450 years old. This condition of not being one thing or the other is a metaphor for so much else in the novel. I always do my best to avoid spoilers so I won’t give away key plot points, in order to preserve the sense of discovery and excitement—the “aha!” moments—I experienced while reading. This novel is 700-plus pages, a lot of room to pack in a whole heaping helping of highly operatic doings. To name a few, we have deaths by drowning in the bogs surrounding Fayne, madwomen being put away in terrible places, illegitimate children, a baron of the lineage being put away for having a tail, drug addiction—and I’ve avoided mentioning some of the biggies! It slowed down a bit somewhere in the middle for me but soon picked up again and galloped along to the finish.

This book is a gift. A love letter to humans, animals and the land they inhabit. It is captivating and spell binding.

Charlotte Bell, daughter of widower Lord Henry Bell, has had a privileged yet sheltered upbringing at a manor in the DC of Fayne, a large plot of land ambiguously located between England and Scotland. Her mother died while giving birth to her, and her older brother is also deceased. Charlotte is isolated from others due to a ‘condition’ which isn’t clear at the beginning of the story.

Identity, connection, found family, and stewardship are all wrapped up together in the mystery, the mist, and the bog that surrounds Fayne. It enthralled me completely. The less revealed, the better. All 722 pages of this book kept this reader engaged and entertained. That is no easy feat.

I give this book five stars. I highly recommend it.

Thank you to Penguin Random House, Knopf Canada and Netgalley for my advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Good book, a bit long and dragging at bits. I don't think this is a book for everyone. I thought it was perfectly fine.

I tried this book twice. it's for my Canadian author project but it is too long. I finally DNF it at 25%.
It's not a bad book or the writing style or something, and i am still interesting the story setting. i will give it another chance for sure, maybe beginning of 2023

Backstory: With the exception of “Adult Onset”, I’ve read everything that Ann-Marie MacDonald has published. I prefer MacDonald’s plays. However, “The Way the Crow Flies” remains to be one of my favourite novels, and I read that in one sitting.

This story was an emotional rollercoaster, and I loved it—every single moment of it!
For those who don’t enjoy historical fiction, you’ve been warned. This longer historical fiction touches on issues of nationality, class, gender, sexuality, morality/social behaviours, and culture. At its forefront, however, is gender and by extension of gender, sexism and sexuality: unsurprising considering the time period: Scotland in the 19th century.

I promise that I tried to slowly savour “Fayne”. I didn’t want to devour it all in one mouthful, and initially I did
well . . . Until I didn’t. I don’t even know where to start with this review because the plot isn’t the highlight. The character development is, and so is the setting.

As expected, MacDonald created a time and place that I felt completely immersed in. I could smell the bog on the grounds of Fayne, taste Clarissa’s social default dessert of “pooding”, and hear the ruckus at Miss Gourley’s Refuge. And yet the settings don’t detract from the plot and/or character development. The various locations (No. One Bell Gardens, Fayne, The Refuge, etc.) are not merely places in the story, but are locations of micro stories within the bigger story of Charlotte’s/Charles’ life as well as backdrops of various types of lives some women in Scotland would have lived. While these backdrops can serve as divisive, they’re also places where women commune.

The strength of setting and place in this novel, at least for me, was in the locations where women came together to support one another: Mae, Sheehan, and Knox together in Mae’s room where she lost her babies; Charlotte/Charles and Gwen developing their life-long friendship in Charlotte’s/Charles’ gigantic ancestral grounds of Fayne; and Miss Gourley’s Refuge, where mothers and daughters reunite/unite and where community among women is paramount to the survival and success of those who seek refuge there.

Is it the places where the women live that shape and develop their character or is it their relationships? Because the strength of female character dominates this story. And whether you like her or not, even Clarissa is a reminder of the sacrifices and compromises that women make on a daily basis, and I loved the moments when Clarissa's sharpness were punctuated with why she was the way she was. And in retrospect, I loved all of the women’s strength in this novel. It’s one of its best features of the story, for even in the face of adversity, the women fight and prevail. Does that make the ending a bit too much of a happy one? One could argue it does. But it’s fiction, and I read too many books where women are afterthoughts instead of heroines, so this “sappy” ending sat well with me.

While the men are not the centre of attention in this story, they are, regardless at the centre of so many of the women’s stories, but they’re not caricatures; they’re complex, multi-dimensional people who are faced with making difficult choices about their lives while aware how their choices could and would affect the women in their lives. Sometimes they were clueless, but we know those men exist, too.

Kudos to MacDonald for making each and every character unique, interesting, and complex. I won’t touch on how the story focuses on gender, anatomy, sexuality, and the acceptance of people’s choices because I didn’t know about that when I requested this ARC, and it was the best thematic/topical surprise of the novel for me! Just know it’s intrinsically part of the characters’ arcs and that—without the questions posed about gender and sexuality, the protagonist Charlotte/Charles wouldn’t have been able to fully come alive, and what a lively character they are!

Now, I’m faced with a tough decision: Do I dare read “Adult Onset” knowing that I may have to wait years for MacDonald to publish another story/play or do I wait for a day when I want to read something well-written by a beloved author?!

Many, many thanks to NetGalley, Penguin Random House Canada and Knopf Canada for an ARC of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s newest novel, “Fayne”!

The writing style is not for me. The old-timey speech was tedious, and the subject matter didn't grab my attention soon enough for me to continue with this novel.
I received a digital review copy from Penguin Random House Canada