Skip to main content

Book review: Menewood by Nicola Griffith

Hild by Nicola Griffith was my favourite book of recent years, so I was very pleased to hear there was a sequel - Menewood - and then very pleased to get an eARC of it a couple of months ago.

Hild was about the early years of the girl who would become St Hilda, up to age 18, and this book covers the next few years of her life. She is cousin to a king, and influences the world around her in many different ways. Menewood is a wooded valley that she owns, and it's the place in this book that she goes back to. She has a certain amount of power because of her family connections, but also has a lot of other skills which she brings to bear to affect what's going on around her.

Reading it is like travelling back in time to the seventh century. It's really immersive - sights and smells are so well described. There's no Tardis to translate for you, but there's a glossary at the back as there are a few words that have no modern equivalent.

What is now England was a number of different kingdoms in the seventh century, and there's a lot about the shifting alliances and threats of, and actual battles going on. I find that sort of thing difficult to keep in my head. I'm looking forward to getting the book and re-reading it while flicking back to the maps and list of characters to keep track. Nicola helps us though, by reminding us of where people fit in when they pop up again.

As well as the bigger things going on, there are also more personal stories going on in her life. She uses her power, and the skills of those who look to her to provide for more people as they come to Menewood, but also for other settlements further afield. In turn, those around her look out for her, as she works on making life better for her people - those who live in Elmet (which covers some of what is now Yorkshire).

I know from Nicola's blog posts some of the research she's done, so there's nothing like "We'll get to Sherwood [from Dover] by nightfall", as Kevin Costner said in Robin Hood - Prince of Thieves. Travel is slow and may take days. I'm the sort of person who wonders how the economics of stories work ("What was Frodo's job?), and there's nothing puzzling me in this book!

It's released on 3 October, 2023. For more information on how to pre-order it see Menewood.

Here's a quote to whet your appetite:

Winter war was the ruin of the pattern.

Near the beginning of a new weave, if she felt a flaw through her hands—the hitch in the flow, a tension on the loom as she threaded the shuttle through the warp—she could stop and unpick one row: a moment, a blink, and it was mended. But if she ignored it, if she pretended it was nothing, she would begin to feel each pass of the shuttle, each beat of the weft turn more wrong, until she slowed, closed her eyes, and stopped. Then she must tally the time it would take to undo the weave, and weigh that against the rest of the work to be done.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Follow up to Matt's "Three feelings" post

This is in response to Matt 's post Three feelings I don't have a word for .  (A blog post in response to a blog post. How quaint.) "Imagined vastness" sounds like a very specific instance of the more general "sense of wonder" or sensawunda . For me I get that feeling of imagined vastness when reading Iain M Banks' Culture series. I don't get the Stack Overflow vertigo he talks about, but I do have a feeling of holding something almost physical when I've got something on the clipboard and I haven't pasted it yet. It's similar to the feeling that I (maybe it is just me) get when I know there's a bit of coffee left at the bottom of the cup. Atemporal hotel lobbies is something I can't really relate to. I do have my own unnamed feeling though: Cycling to work It's that moment when I whizz down our sloped drive and start pedalling up to the road. Because I WFH I go out at lunchtime these days, and the feeling just isn't the sa

20 years of blogging: First post

Back in 1999 it mostly cost money to run a blog (from what I can remember). You had to sort out your own hosting. Then Dave Winer  made on offer on his blogging platform editthispage.com  for a 60 day free trial , so I was away. So what was my very first post? What words did I choose to post for all on the internet to see?  23 December 1999 I'm stil trying to decide what to do with this. Click on the skull to add your suggestion. Oh, that's not very good is it. A typo in the second word too. The URL was morrissfamily.editthispage.com. (I think. Everything I say could be unreliable, because it was a while ago.) I also created an FAQ page that day: Who are the Morriss family? We are just a normal family with a dad who likes exploring the internet. Why don't you have more information? Because I'm not sure want I want to do with this site. I think there are no typos there. The idea was that I would share family news. Come back in January to see what my next

20 years of blogging: fourth post

4/1/2000 Things are moving   We've had the letter from Wycliffe about "raising support".  They want us to aim that 25% of our income comes from other people by the end of a year, and 50% by the end of two years.  Other news: I've officially asked for voluntary redundancy Spoiler: after 4 years of trying I didn't even get to 20%, so I was paid a salary after all.