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Book Review: The Witch's Brat
Feb. 21st, 2014 01:06 pmI've read enough Sutcliff at this point that I found The Witch's Brat something of a breath of fresh air: it's quite different from much of her other work and doesn't push the same buttons. The book takes place in medieval England rather than ancient Roman Britain (or the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries), the hero Lovel doesn't have a dog, and he is neither a warrior nor an artist. Instead, Lovel occupies the third and least common Sutcliff occupation: he's a healer.
Sutcliff's style and her thematic preoccupations are usually so distinctive that her books don't remind me of anyone else's work, but The Witch's Brat put me in mind of Elizabeth Janet Gray's Adam of the Road. Gray's novel focuses on a medieval minstrel's son who, in the most Sutcliffian thing ever to happen outside a Sutcliff novel, goes chasing after his kidnapped dog with nary a backward glance and thus gets separated from his father for months.
However, The Witch's Brat is not a total outlier among Sutcliff's work. Lovel does have a hunchback and a limp, and at one point he compares himself to a lost dog.
It's also one of her most sustained treatments of religion: Lovel becomes a monk after his fellow villagers chase him out of his village, and religion seems much more pervasive than it does in Sutcliff's other medieval novel, Knight's Fee. (Even then, Lovel notes repeatedly that he isn't very good at praying. I guess making him a devout monk was simply a bridge too far.)
Sutcliff's style and her thematic preoccupations are usually so distinctive that her books don't remind me of anyone else's work, but The Witch's Brat put me in mind of Elizabeth Janet Gray's Adam of the Road. Gray's novel focuses on a medieval minstrel's son who, in the most Sutcliffian thing ever to happen outside a Sutcliff novel, goes chasing after his kidnapped dog with nary a backward glance and thus gets separated from his father for months.
However, The Witch's Brat is not a total outlier among Sutcliff's work. Lovel does have a hunchback and a limp, and at one point he compares himself to a lost dog.
It's also one of her most sustained treatments of religion: Lovel becomes a monk after his fellow villagers chase him out of his village, and religion seems much more pervasive than it does in Sutcliff's other medieval novel, Knight's Fee. (Even then, Lovel notes repeatedly that he isn't very good at praying. I guess making him a devout monk was simply a bridge too far.)
