The Sin Eater

A brilliant first novel by Megan Campisi. I found the very thinly veiled references to Elizabethan history quite tongue in cheek and amusing. A very emotive story, a few grim and ghastly moments but overall May's bright and guileless inner thoughts provided a sense of wry humour and more importantly, hope. I look forward to more works from Megan Campisi.

PS: I also found the cover art really stunning, one of my favourites ever.

DNF at page 147

I really wanted to like this book. I found the concept of the sin-eater endlessly fascinating, and the idea of Eve taking the place of Lucifer as Ultimate Evil could have led to some great stuff.

Unfortunately, this book just didn't go far enough into the fantasy and world-building to hold my interest. 

The main thing that kept taking me out of the book is how utterly lazy the world-building is. It's Elizabethan England, but all of the names have been changed, and not much else. It's the literary equivalent of calling a book “The Wives of Shmenry the Shmeighth, and his daughter Shmelizabeth”. EVERYTHING, from the number of wives the Old King Harold had, to the number of daughters who became queens to how the wife of the Queen's Favorite died is the same. Now, I'm a certified Tudor armchair historian, so the almost plagiarism was super glaring and annoying. I have no problem with having a fantasy world that is similar to a real-life world, but there needs to be some things that make this different. It's like the author wanted things both ways. Either set it in an AU of Elizabethan England or set it in a fantasy world that you do actual world-building in.

With that, the characters just weren't interesting enough for me to care about. May is fine, but she's a blank slate. Part of it is her profession, and her inability to speak, but even her inner world isn't super intriguing. The relationship with the first sin-eater seemed like it was going somewhere interesting and then didn't. The courtiers were boring, and for me, the court intrigue is always the most fun part of any book. But I just didn't care.

And with the fact that I'm well-versed in Tudor history, legends, and rumors, I kinda already knew how it was gonna end, and I didn't care enough about the characters to continue. 

There were also a lot of interesting feminist questions to bring up, what with sin-eaters only being women, and Eve being the equivalent of Lucifer in this world's religion could bring of a lot of incredibly interesting questions about feminism and patriarchy that were not touched on at all. And if I get halfway through a book without these themes being touched on, I doubt they'll be touched on in  a satisfying manner. 

I'd give it a 2.5. The writing was good, and I liked the lore of the sin-eater, but it was just too familiar for my taste.