The Coven's Daughter -- Lucy Jago

Montacute Village, Somerset, England: 1596.

On her thirteenth birthday, poultry girl Cecily Perryn finds a jewel-encrusted locket under one of her hens. While she doesn't have many friends—people in the village generally avoid fatherless bastards as well as those who consort with suspected witches, and Cess is both—she feels sure that the locket must have been put there for her. But by who? And why?

That would be dangerous enough—if, after all, she is caught with it, people will assume that it's stolen—but there's a more pressing problem: boys are disappearing from the area and turning up dead, so there are mutterings about witchcraft in the village. When Cess' best friend disappears, all heads turn towards her, and it won't be long before accusations start to fly...

Considering its extremely short length (under 250 pages), The Coven's Daughter took me AGES to read. While I was reading, I enjoyed it well enough—the period details are especially good—there was nothing in the storyline or the characterization or the relationships between the characters that created any sort of "Read Me! Read Me!" draw. So, I was halfway through the book all week long (I kept procrastinating by getting caught up on Leverage*) and I finally sat down and finished it just now.

The author clearly did a TON of research, and, like I said, the period details are good. But her method of explaining them gets old, as it always follows the same pattern:

"Gorse, cousin? Be glad it is not elder," quipped Cess before she could stop herself. With its strong smell and easily drilled wood, that plant festooned the poles of girls who had been easy with the boys as Cess knew Beth had, for all her superior airs.

Almost always the detail, and then an explanation from the narrator. It doesn't feel necessarily awkward or forced, but when it happens four times on a page (which was often), it slows the rhythm, and it distracts attention from the already-thin story.

Occasionally, the explanation comes in the form of infodump dialogue, and that IS awkward:

Edith nodded gravely. "These men hold extreme views, I have heard of them. They are trained on the Continent and smuggled into England. The majority of Catholics in this country are law-abiding people, wanting only to practice their faith without persecution. They are as much afraid of the radicals as everyone else, if not more so, for their murderous plots make all Catholics appear to be enemies of the Queen. It is a sad state of affairs."

Beyond that, my biggest complaint is that the magic element seems extraneous, more a vehicle to ease the plot along than anything else. It's a pretty straightforward story—even with the political intrigue, there aren't really any surprises if you've read a few stories in this vein... which I have—and overall, it felt very, very outlined. Like, A led to B led to C led to D which of course led to E and F. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

And, who knows? Young readers might note the parallels between religious extremism then and religious extremism now.

Five word review? Competent, but not amazingly so.

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*Josh loves Parker, of course, while I heart Eliot.

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Book source: ILLed through my library.