Lapvona

No trigger warning left unflagged

Author: American, of Iranian extraction and darling of literary circles since her debut novel, ‘Eileen’ (2015), was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. FTR, I thought it should have won the Booker in 2016. (‘The Sellout’ by Paul Beatty did, but was a DNF for me.)
Plot: Essentially, it’s a fairytale of the Grimm variety rather than Disney one. Make that Uber-Grimm. There are five parts based around the seasons, starting and finishing with Spring. The setting is a fictional middle Europe in the Middle Ages. Life is hard. Religiosity abounds, and there’s buckets or violence and depravity, in both the literal and figurative sense.
The main character is a deformed (rickets is my guess) teenage boy whose mother died in childbirth and whose father likes his sheep better than his kid. (No Kiwi jokes, I promise.) The evil, if somewhat inept, overlord, who reigns terror on his serfs, gets his comeuppance in the end, although the serfs are no better off as a result. (Rather like changes of government after democratic elections nowadays).
Writing: Plot has never been Ms M’s number one priority. Historical research ditto, it seems (If you want that, read Ken Follett.) She also ditches her customary first person interior monologues here for a third person omniscient narrator and multiple POVs, which limits character development. She likes to offend though, and has never been in better form in that regard. I liked the short punchy sentences, which are a departure from her usual style. Ms M is a gifted wordsmith. Though not her best work IMO, this is worth reading if only to marvel at her uncanny ability to make words zing off the page.