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I liked that I felt that I connected with Mae and other characters in the book, they were accessible and normalised. Furthermore, the pacing was unnecessarily ponderous, and I spent much of this novel wondering when something was finally going to happen. Leah’s odd perspective had little added value and there are a lot of plot lines that are only slowly dealt with. Essentially, this is a novel that probes the plague in Eyam and the witch-finding cult in the C17 -- how women, who did not conform to sexual and gender norms, faced accusations of consorting with the Devil.
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Quite often I’m reading other people’s manuscripts, and I’ll put aside a full week to concentrate on their work. Leah's character, despite not being able to directly interact with any of the other characters, is so well thought out.Like her feelings for Rafe, Isabel's ward, or that she studies from Wulfric's forbidden books at night. It was the woman of the house who oversaw the work of the stillroom, meaning that many gentlewomen worked with herbs too. While I believe this book was marketed as “female friendship” to survive, I found this was much more of a lesser theme to this book. The relationship between Mae and her father was more difficult to read about though - his thoughts on women generally, including his daughter, were harsh and controlling.
Author - Joanne Burn
The Hemlock Cure by Joanne Burn is an excellent and fascinating historical fiction that gives the reader a glimpse of what it would have been like to have been present in England during the plague of 1666. This wonderful book is based on true events that happened in 1666’s England during the plague where a whole village, Eyam, quarantined itself in an attempt to slow the number of deaths occurring from the plague, and let me tell you, after the last two years this book certainly makes for an interesting read! Baseado em factos reais, a história que nos é contada em “A Cura da Cicuta” é passada na vila de Eyam, entre 1665 e 1666 (período em que Inglaterra se debatia com a peste negra).What really captivated me about this was the fact that it's all told from the perspective of Leah, Mae's older, and long dead, sister. Having said that, the idea for the novel I’m currently working on came together very quickly – over just a few months. We soon learn that Isabel has a history with Mae’s father and she’s concerned what may happen to Mae while she continues living with him, as he’s an abusive religious man who is hiding all manner of shocking family secrets which Mae is about to uncover. But when plague comes to Eyam her father's religious intolerance grows worse, his lust for her begins to grow and the elders of the village take the decision to put it under quarantine.