The Hild saga continues!

Early Middle Ages, Northumbria. The Romans have mostly left Britain. This is no cohesive country, but rather kingdoms or tribes that are constantly at war. The roman priests are gaining some influence. Importantly they bring the written word. Communication is enhanced. It is a record of accord, especially if all parties have a signed and witnessed statement. Hild uses this to ensure her conditions of agreement are not set aside later in the novel.
I also noted that later Hild warned King Oswald about letting the bishop speak to his people for him.
Hild Yffing, “light of the world and godmouth; hægtes and freemartin; Butcherbird and king’s fist ... [and] new-made Lady of Elmet.”
Hild is niece to Edwin Yffing, Overking of the people north of the Humbre. A woman surrounded by mystique, legend and song.
Hild has seen what kings can do to the common people and to the land. (After winning a battle kings have a war-host that needs to be kept occupied. That’s trouble.) She has already planned for a safe place to live and hide deep in Elmet, in Menewood. Hild’s had caches of food and supplies hidden, and unobtrusive gardens sown throughout the countryside. She’s walked and ridden that land, payed attention to the seasons, the flight of birds, the way the streams run. She notes it all. That sense of oneness with the land lifts her story.
When King Edwin plans to face a cunning and ruthless foe, Cadwallon, (who is determined to wipe all Yffings of the faces of the land), Hild is troubled when some of Edwin’s allies haven’t sworn to him in the traditional way. Edwin is unconcerned. He should be!
Hild has been called to bless the warband and Edwin’s undertaking in the coming battle. She had planned to leave straight after, but Edwin insists on taking his ‘godmouth’ with him to the front.
Big with child, Hild and her Hounds, her gesith (elite fighting force), are trapped between the opposing armies. They can’t escape the surging hoards, filled with battle lust. Betrayal is the key to the fiercesome, brutal battle that follows. It is the death knell, the tragic loss of all Hild holds dear.
Her escape back to Menewood will be sorely endured and won over many months.
Hild is religious, both aware of the old ways and the new ways. She merges pagan and Christian practices, seeing the strengths of both.
Her final battles has her seeking the best for her people, but always the will of kings will be troublesome. Hild is special, she is fierce and true, and kings want to control her.
I loved the glossary. It helped me to come closer to the story.
Colorful, raw and splendid writing gives shape to the person Hild is become. Her Wyrd is not finished.
An enticing, readable and at times harrowing continuation of Hild’s story brought to life in startling ways. A book that simultaneously gives us an insight into what many thought of as the Dark Ages. An age that reveals the beauty and the hell of human history … that continues into today.

A Farrar, Straus and Giroux ARC via NetGalley.
Many thanks to the author and publisher.
Please note: Quotes taken from an advanced reading copy maybe subject to change
(Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.)

My opinions about Menewood are mixed. I’m deeply frustrated by it. The last half is a really interesting, well written, exciting epic historical fiction that is deeply researched and positively dripping with atmosphere. The first half is meandering, overlong, over complicated and full of the absolutely unnecessary and off putting thing that made me so angry about Hild. If you’ve also read Hild, and if you also found that end off putting and upsetting, it does not go away, and be prepared for it to consume the first 300 pages of Hild. If you were okay with it, then press on, I guess.

I also think the editor did a disservice in not forcing Griffith to cut some of this. 720 pages is a huge book and a huge ask for a reader. I go in expecting a book to earn every page over 350, and double earn every page over 500. This book did not do that. As I often say, there probably is a very good novel’s worth of pages in Menewood, but unfortunately there’s also a bad novel’s worth of pages, and it would have been to the story’s benefit to have them trimmed.

This book finished stronger than it started, and in spite of that review, I loved watching Hild come into her own, as a woman, and as a leader. Ultimately I was both disappointed by, and yet somehow really enjoyed this book, thanks to a strong ending. But I really don’t think I can recommend most people press on through the first 300 pages to get to the good part.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for this honest review.

I don't read much fiction set in early Europe, in particular those tumultuous decades between the fall of Rome and the rise of medieval kings, as most of it is men with swords laying waste to each other and everything else in their way. If nature didn't trash them first.

That said, there are a few names that will catch my eye, and Hild of Whitby is one of them, like Hildegard of Bingen, who flourished a few centuries later. Before I go on with the review, I should mention that I did not read the previous novel, as some reviews made it seems like it rubbed your face in dirt, disease, and blood and guts. But this second one, moving toward Hild's becoming abess of Whitby, made me want to give it a try.

I really struggled through a lot of it. The brutal, bloody aspects of life are right there front and center through the beginning, framed in a bewildering density of period names and vocabulary that one is supposed to gain from context. For the most part I did pick up what I believe was to be understood about this or that context (or conflict), aided by the author's deft use of nicknames to help differentiate the names that sounded so very alike, and by dialogue meant to convey characters' paradigm.

The reward was the occasional breathtakingly lovely insights about life, and also some of the relationships, particularly that with Hild's former bondwoman. Overall it was definitely a worthwhile read, but it did require close reading, and overcoming pulses of reluctance after especially grotty and gritty scenes. I've no idea how true to the period it is, but it felt true, and Hild's insights resonated.

Reaching the end, I was left impressed with the work the author had put in, and her humane take on a difficult period in the long and difficult struggle of human beings toward civilization. Though it did take me a long time to read, I felt rewarded both by the layers of complexity brought to this story, and by those shafts of insight.

I hope this gets nominated for All The Awards. I'll certainly vote for it.

Ms Griffith once again takes us into the medieval world of 7th century Britain with all of its splendor, dirt, greed, war, family and love. This is a continuation of the novel Hild, beginning four months after Hild ends and covering he next four years in Hild's life. These four years in Northern British history are filled with chaos, war and changes that bring kings and religions to critical points of change.

Hild is a a tried and true warrior, viewed as a "Godspeaker" or prophet across Britain and in Edwin's court. She is also the Lady of Elmet, a wife, soon to be mother, a daughter and protector of the people who make up her world. Hild's world will soon be a stronghold, a sanctuary from the ravages of an oncoming war she builds in a damp and marshy place called Menewood. Hild has reached adulthood, she's no longer the precocious and fey child to be used by those around her. She has grown weary of serving kings and fighting for King Edwin in the ongoing wars for power. Nonetheless, Hild will do what is necessary to protect the kingdom and her people. She has gained a keen understanding of the chaos and some of the changes and perils that will be faced in the near future and she intends to be prepared for her and her people to survive it.

Menewood is an epic tale and somehow, Nicola Griffith has managed to outdo herself and her prior book, Hild. And, Hild was extraordinary. I am anxious to read more of Hild, after all, Saint Hild had a larger story than just wars and minor kingdoms; There is so much more to learn about future Prioress Hild. I hope there's a third novel of Hild in the future and that it will be told to us by this very talented storyteller!

Menewood is the highly anticipated sequel to Hold. This is as fantastic as the first and is very rich with detail for a historical fiction novel. Great Read and amazing work by Griffith.

Menewood is the long-awaited sequel to Hild. It's vividly written and rich with detail. Hild herself is a gorgeously written character, but I felt that everyone else fell somewhat flat around her. I'm also not sure the author did a good job balancing the nitty-gritty detail with the larger picture; it often felt like the prose kept getting lost in the weeds.

Menewood is the sequel to Hild and I think that if I read the first one first I would have liked it better. The book was slow and I have no idea who Hild really is but that might be because I did not read the first one. This author does have tons of details about places but for me the plot fell short. The plot seemed to get jumbled up and confusing and I was not sure what was going on at times. With some of the wording the author uses I was not sure what the word was and I would have to reread sometimes to figure out the word. For me this book was hard to get through and slow. I would recommend this book still to people you like this author or read the first one. Thank you to NetGalley and publisher for this ARC read in exchange for my honest review.

I've been a history junkie all my life, and that extends to historical fiction. And because my undergrad degree was heavy on late classical and early medieval Europe, I really enjoy a good novel set in that period. (Cecelia Holland is one of my favorite novelists for that reason.) All of which is to say that I really, really wanted to love _Hild_, the fictionalized early life of the 7th century Hild Yffing, who became St. Hilda of Whitby, and the earlier book to which this one is a sequel and continuation. But it was a real struggle to get through that one, it took me several times as long as usual, and it was ultimately a disappointment.

The second volume, unfortunately, suffers many of the same problems as the first. A successful author of historical fiction will have learned several lessons early on. The most obvious one is “Don't make things up that are contradicted by the historical record,” and at least that's not a problem here. But the second one is “Don't show off your research with data dumps,” and that is rather a problem. The thing is that few of Griffith's readers will have any experience at all of the complex tangle of little kingdoms of the 650s in the north of England, and being thrown into the midst of it just adds to the reader's load. Griffith also has a habit of using admittedly authentic period idiom and place names, but she does it so much that it drags the narrative down to a crawl and confuses the reader. Hild, for example, is a hæges and godmouth, as well as oath-keeper to her spearmen – but we're never really told what any of those mean, or the social and political roles they imply.

Hild was the niece of King Edwin of Northumbria and the series is heavy on the politics between Edwin and the rival state of Elmet, in what is now Yorkshire, and also on the Christianization of the North, which began with Edwin's conversion (he married a Christian princess) when Hild was thirteen. She had already come to note by her ability to foretell coming events. Not much is known of her early life so Griffith fills in the gaps by having the bright, headstrong girl train in arms (which almost certainly could not have happened), as well as developing into a shrewd advisor to the powerful. Now Edwin has just created her Lady of Elmet, which she will have to defend against her jealous kinsman and neighbor, Osric, Lord of Craven. She and her new husband, Cian (who is also her half-brother) will be responsible for holding all of Southern Northumbria for Edwin. Which means skirmishes in which Hild wields her long lance to effect -- and which also just doesn’t sound like the sort of woman who would go on to become abbess of several religious institutions, ending with Whitby, where she hosted the famous Synod.

All of that is covered in the first hundred pages, which are very slow-paced, and it took me several days to get that far because I had to keep pausing to reread paragraphs to try to understand what was being said. And this thing runs more than nine hundred pages. I hate to admit it but I threw in the towel at that point. Life is too short for that kind of struggle.

This book is absolutely rich with detail and descriptions. Ms. Griffith demonstrates the importance of making those details a necessary component of the story. She shows the connections among things we may not see. From teaching children geography in the dirt with sticks and stones to using that knowledge to accomplish a goal, no detail is too small. Every character is well developed, locations are marvelously described, and the plot is engaging. This is a wonderful book, and I highly recommend it.

Menewood by Nicola Griffith, book 2 in the Hild Sequence, is filled with drama, fantasy, survival, heartbreak and more. If you enjoyed the first book, you would definitely enjoy reading this one. Historical fiction (this one set in 7th century Britian) at its best. The complexities of the Hild’s character have you hoping the story will never end. Look forward to the third book in the series. One thing to note: you can read this as a standalone, but it will make more sense if you read the first book before this one.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

The adjectives are lining up: Lush, Large, Limpid, Epic, Immersive, Magnificent. But first a touch of summary: Menewood takes up the story of the barely-known 7th C British saint Hild (patron saint of education and learning) from where author Nicola Griffith left her at the end of the wonderful novel, Hild. Now 18, Hild is married, and still in the boiling center of political upheaval and intrigue in northern Britain.

I loved the first novel and have nursed hope that we would continue along with Griffith's imaginative journey, so I dove into the story without a backward glance. Three days of reading the eARC, I noticed that I was only 15% through the book. A quick look at the publisher's page and I felt a zing of joy: at 750 pages, I could hope to be inside this beautifully rendered 7th C Britain, with place-names and social conventions and gustatory delights that were as foreign to me as any science fiction for a good long time.

The novel combines extraordinary characters –– Hild is a brilliant tactician, literally larger than life, but also as human as the next warrior as she schemes to shelter her people and gather a war-band to ensure that safety –– with extraordinary research that grounds the story in the rocky, far-off soil of Bernicia and Deira in 632.

There's a glossary that explains that Meadmonath is July, and that midniht is the time from midnight to 3am, that a wealh means a stranger, and that wyrd means a specific sort of fate, but the world is so fully fleshed that I chose to let the context lead me to understanding. A wealh myself plunked into the middle of the very busy story, I was swept into Hild's struggles with warring kings and dangerous allegiances, her savage battles and heartbreaking losses, and the devastation of war on home turf.

I can't recommend this book highly enough. It's a gorgeous, fully transportive chunk of fiction. I think it's going to be remembered as a masterpiece, and I hope to see people lugging it around everywhere for the next few years. Thank you Nicola Griffith!

Also, thanks to NetGalley and publisher Farrar Straus & Giroux for the free eARC in exchange for my unfettered opinion.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!

Wow. Just wow.

This is everything I could have wanted in a history-inspired fantasy. The level of detail and attention to the history of this place and time is extraordinary and led me down so many rabbit holes of reading up on the era (which is something I love when a book does). Beautiful writing and characters too.

"In the much anticipated sequel to Hild, Nicola Griffith's Menewood transports readers back to seventh-century Britain, a land of rival kings and religions poised for epochal change.

Making a much-anticipated return to the world of Hild, Nicola Griffith's Menewood transports readers back to seventh-century Britain, a land of rival kings and religions poised for epochal change. Hild is no longer the bright child who made a place in Edwin Overking's court with her seemingly supernatural insight. She is eighteen, honed and tested, the formidable lady of Elmet, now building her personal stronghold in the valley of Menewood.

But old alliances are fraying. Younger rivals are snapping at Edwin's heels. War is brewing - bitter war, winter war. Not knowing whom to trust, Edwin becomes volatile and recalls his young advisor to court. There Hild begins to understand the true extent of the chaos ahead - and realizes she must find a way to navigate the turbulence and fight to protect both the kingdom and her own people.

She will face the losses and devastation of total war, and then must summon the determination to forge a radically different path for herself and her people. In the valley, her last redoubt, Hild draws strength from the fierce joy she finds in the natural world, as, slowly, her community takes root. She trains herself and her unexpected allies in new ways of thinking, learning what it means to gather and wield true power. And she prepares for one last wager: risking all on a single throw for a better future.

In the last decade, Hild has become a beloved classic of epic storytelling. Menewood exceeds it in every way."

I mean, we've all been "patiently" waiting for this book yes?

Review will be posted here on 12-Oct-23: http://www.nerds-feather.com/2023/10/review-menewood-by-nicola-griffith.html

Hild was unexpected and beautiful. If you haven't read it, it's a fictionalised telling of the early life of Hild(a) of Whitby - a woman born in the 7th century CE to a Deiran royal household (an early British kingdom based in the north-east, around modern York) who went from pagan to Christian to abbess to sainthood, and was the founder of the monastery at Whitby, where the Synod of Whitby (which codified the British approach to the date of Easter, and their alignment with the Roman rather than Celtic churches) was held. Hild details her young life in the royal court of her uncle Edwin, King of Northumbria, and her struggle to find a place there. It casts her as someone particularly capable of reading into the patterns she observes in the world, whether they be in nature or in the actions of people, and who, prompted by her mother, uses this ability to be viewed as a quasi-mystical seer, helping guide the king's actions through a tumultuous period of history, both politically and religiously.

Some of Hild's impact is simply through how unexpected it is - there is a breathtaking level of immersion into the world of 7th century Northumbria, and into the worldview of a particularly astute and thoughtful girl who might live in it. It's a novel you leave somewhat dazed and dazzled, suffering from the whiplash of returning to modernity after a viewpoint so seamlessly portrayed and inhabited. And that can be a difficult thing to follow. The bar has been set high, the setting, the writing, the visuals and immersion are all known, and there's always a risk that, when known, they become that much less impressive.

Luckily, it's been written by Nicola Griffith, and so she's not only avoided this problem entirely, but somehow managed to deliver an even more stunning sequel to an already stunning book.

Menewood is a book about many things - womanhood, motherhood, the price of power, living in an everchanging world, survival, will, and simply the world of 7th century Northumbria. It encompasses a huge portion of life, of a whole worldview of a person, and manages to do so seamlessly, artfully and deftly at every single turn. It takes you through intensely traumatic events, both personal and political, and makes you view them as a human would, in all their detail and cost and chaos, in all the things someone would need to survive them, and what that survival would cost. The story is humanly told, and manages to make comprehensible and engaging a fairly complex and less-known piece of history, in a way that feels genuinely readable, without sacrificing that complexity or the realities of the world for the sake of modern readership.

Which is to say the plot, however predictably based in real historical events, nevertheless manages to suck you in, and remains just as great as its predecessor.

However, the plot is not what I want to talk about, when I think about what makes this book stands out for me, good as it is. There are four strands of the weave I think really demonstrate what a thoroughly skilfully told novel this is, and why it stands out amongst its peers, and it's those I want to highlight instead.

Firstly, and most prominently throughout the story - the worldbuilding.

A thing you quite often see in less well-told historical fiction is the author's need to show off that they know something that doesn't really fit into the story, but it's a neat fact that just had to be crammed in somehow, because they did all this research and so it needs to be put on the page. And then that multiplied across the story, until you are constantly being elbow-nudged about yes, this is a historical work. Griffith manages the opposite of that.

When you pause to thing, to examine a phrase even, you realise just how much work, how much research, how much thinking has gone into crafting 7th century Northumbria in a way the reader can truly be immersed in. On examination, it's there to see. But in the moment of reading, it is invisible, or subtle, or offhand. It's never the focus, but it is absolutely the lens, and when you begin to realise just how much there is of it, you realise what a marvel of a book this is.

Offhand remarks, are icebergs of worldbuilding:

Every man in the hall wept openly; most of the women were dry-eyed.

This is a cultural context where the act of showing emotion is read and performed differently than in modern Britain. It's a single line, and the story moves on, but it leaves us with a little nugget of information, and doesn't feel the need to explain it to us. The reader is trusted to draw their conclusions, to think about how a world might look different when this is true, compared to our own.

Then, to take a more overt example - the way Griffith incorporates period language (or period-seeming language) into not just the dialogue, but the text itself. The months are given unfamiliar names - like Hrethmonath - but because the descriptions of the world are always rooted in the physical, in the constant turning of the seasons and the work they demand, it is never unclear when in the year each event takes place. But it stretches deeper than this - plants, animals, places, people, so many things in the world take on names that embed them into setting, and doubly so when Griffith consciously evokes the multilinguality of 7th century Britain. Hild herself speaks several languages, and how she names certain things, and in which tongue, is a subtle insight into how the sociocultural groups of her world interact with it and each other. And of course, which language she chooses to speak, and to whom. There is a constant fluidity to Hild's world, a need to shift modes of thought and communication to suit her environment in a way that many modern Anglophones are quite unfamiliar with, and it is such a good grounding for the realities of the setting. She may speak Anglisc to her uncle, and to his court, and when she wishes to appear formal and full of power, but then she'll shift to British to speak to her family, or when she thinks about a bird in the sky, how its flight tells her the frost will come early this year.

Which leads us on to our second strand - Hild's gaze, and the natural world that shapes and informs it at every turn, and the language used to describe it all so vividly.

As a modern, metropolitan reader, my connection with the natural world is tenuous at best. I can name wildflowers and trees, I am happy walking in a forest along clear trails, and I enjoy being in boats and seeing wildlife. I even like camping. But that's... the extent of it. I can enjoy it, but my knowledge of the natural world around me is superficial at best, and limited by the constraints the modern world imposes on the natural.

Hild, by contrast, is written as someone who not only lives in a world much closer to the natural than the one I see, but reads it as easily as living in it. Like so:

The rain started at Beal, and the oaks on either bank stood bare and mournful. The scent of spring dirt struck a chord and, just like that, between one bend of the river and another, she was inside the scents and sounds of home. Elmet, where she was born and where she belonged. This was the heart of home, the place that sang to her in her dreams, where she could name the dirt between her fingers, greet the give of grass under her feet, know the flirr and flit of feathers between the trees. But surrounding the lift in her heart, holding in check the rising joy under her breastbone, she felt watchful. There were no bright cuts of recent pruning. On an inside curve of the river a bittern, nesting in a reed bed, boomed at them. She had never seen a bittern so close to this usually busy stretch of river. And the river itself ran very clear.

At so many points in the story, the world turns on her familiarity with the details that seem small to us but are all part of the pattern for her - a bird out of place, a river running clean, trees unpruned. Hild is meant to be remarkable in her affinity for finding these patterns, it is part of her character, but the way Griffith weaves it into the text makes it so believable, so bounded by the life her character would have led that of course someone like Hild could be like this. It's not miraculous, except in how it is used, filtered through Hild's intelligence and thoughtfulness into something sharp and useful. It is simply someone accustomed to a different world and its rhythms, attuned to it, and reading it.

But even beyond that, the way she reads it, constantly imbued with admiration, with beauty and crystal clarity, makes it an incredibly immersive world - and worldview - to inhabit. Griffith draws on the mores of old English poetry in her use of alliteration and repetition, but gives it all a beauty apparent to the modern reader. There are so many charming phrases littered through the book that I felt the need to jot down while reading - gleaming and glittering in the glorious gear of war - and when these are turned to nature, Hild's dearest love that underpins all, and paired with a deft ear for the onomatopeia of wild things, they become almost holy, and wholly present for the reader.

Don't let this fool you into thinking it's a tranquil, pastoral book, though. Just like its predecessor, Menewood is a story that turns on the inherent chaos and instability of the world in which Hild lives. At the time - and this is something Griffith takes great pains to make plain in Menewood particularly - so much of the stability of the world was invested in the king. Not the institute of kingship, not the apparatus of governance, but a single man and his personal relationship with power and those around him. When he dies, the world is tipped to chaos and a new king must make it all anew - or not. Menewood is, in part, a story of the fragility of that world, and the awareness of those who live in it of how precarious it all can be. And this is the third part of what the book does so well - it makes you truly see this, without ever bludgeoning you over the head with it. Griffith eschews long tracts of exposition, but the information comes through all the same. We see the growing hunger of those outside and apart from the throne of Edwin king, we see Hild's growing awareness of what might come, of what she might prevent, and what suffering it might bring her. She lives in a world poised on the edge of the precipice, and she must seek to have those she loves survive it, even if she cannot stop it.

But - and this is the fourth part, and perhaps the most subtle but satisfying - it's also a book full of awareness of change that's coming, that will wipe away much of that chaos. Underpinning all of the rest of the book - quietly, constantly - is the knowledge of the waxing and waning of religious change coming to Hild and her people, and all that the growth of Christianity brings with it. Because for Hild, it brings writing. It brinks agreements of the "boc" - things written down that endure beyond the rise and fall of one man as king, so long as the church survives to hold men to them. We, the reader, know how the story ultimately ends. Christianity adopted, Hild an abbess. This is history. But Griffith manages to make that inevitabilty dynamic nonetheless, makes it feel less than certain. And the way she showcases the different ways the people in that world approached and related to their faith or faiths, what it meant to them, what it meant to kings, what it meant to politics, is as clever as it is subtle, integrated as it is with the far more overt parts of the story. People convert, but they don't always understand. Sometimes they're forced. Sometimes they shift back to their old religion. Their faith may tie them together with allies, or they may be enemies regardless of it. And Griffith makes us truly see that, truly be situated in a world of such changing forces on all sides, but where just ahead, on the horizon, visible to someone with a mind for pattern and prediction like Hild, we see too the growing spectre of the sort of change that changes everything.

And part of that is our proximity to Hild's own faith, which is an interesting mix of the devout and the pragmatic. It's a tragedy of history that most people see people in the past as either stupid or mystical geniuses, but never in between, as people capable of the same sort of thought (and lack thereof) as we are now. But in Hild, in her faith, we see someone grappling with such a relatable struggle, in an alien context, and Griffith has managed to find that perfect medium of humanity without denying its historical context.

Menewood is a fantastic sequel to Hild. It's rare for a second book in a trilogy to eclipse the first, or even equal it, but it feels like Griffith has done just that here. It's a novel full of paradox - present, relatable humanity against a true immersion in a historical context; a lens of the natural world used to make plain the most human of problems; an intimate character portrait and a wideview lens on the politics of a whole kingdom - but it never falters, drawing it all together into a seamless whole with an ease and grace that belies how truly deep it feels, when you pause to scratch the surface. It is a book about a strange, singular woman, and her view on the world around her, and it is a marvel.

Nicola Griffith has done it again. A stupendous sequel to her incredible Hild. Admittedly there were far more characters and oddly spelled names than I could follow, but it DID NOT MATTER. The story itself, and her beautiful prose made the novel totally engrossing and delicious. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys historical fiction and strong female protagonists.

If you enjoyed the beautifully written and totally immersive Hild, you will love this.

A detailed story of survival, heartbreak, and quiet little wonders amidst a background of danger and political intrigue. It illuminates the incredible damage that war can do, its various struggles bleeding onto ancient roads that have already seen too much.

A tale that stuck with me, and one I wholly recommend.
ARC acquired via NetGalley.

I’m working through this book. It is intriguing, but there are a lot of challenging names and unique words for the world. I’m finding it challenging.

I read a review copy thanks to NetGalley.

The waiting was well-worth this lovely, beautiful, utterly moving wonder of a novel. Hild was one of my favourite reads of the year ten years ago, and the sequel surpasses it with its scope and terror and, sorry to repeat myself, sheer beauty. The novel covers a few years in Hild's life - a tumultous time of change and upheaval for both her and Britain. Hild must survive great losses and setbacks and emerges older, wiser, more experienced.

There is much story here, but I don't wish to spoil it (history provides some pointers as to what one may expect anyway). What I want to praise, instead, is Griffith's astonishing perfectionist attention to detail and loving crafting of Hild's world. I loved the relationships between characters, but I loved their ways of being in the world even more. The work they do, the environment they shape and that shapes them. The plants, the animals, the technologies, the ways bodies feel when hurt. All of this is written with such skill and beauty.

And then there's the alliterative, beautiful language that made me gasp even when what was being written about was so tragic that I wanted to cry (I cried on the tram at one point).

Highest possible recommendation.

I didn't want Menewood to end. I wanted to stay with Hild, out in the wind, looking at the world and knowing things. This is a gorgeous book, detailed and sensuous and raw and painful and strong and full of life everywhere. It follows Hild over a short period of time as she moves through various roles, always seeking ways to keep her people and lands safe, always thinking and considering and observing. It's a long read, yes, but every single word pulls its weight as Griffith draws the reader into 7th-century Britain; the language is fascinating, and the way description is worked in is perfectly fashioned. My summer plans include re-reading Hild and then immediately following it with a re-read of Menewood.

There are a few typos: I caught "food" for "fool," and "Leofdag" for "Leofdaeg." Towards the end of the book, the long i mark is missing from words like "wīc" and "scōp."

This is a kick-butt historical fiction - coming of age . The characters are loveable and the plot intense and engaginh. Overall an excellent reading experience.