Changeling: Order of Darkness, Book One -- Philippa Gregory
It's 1453, and there are those within the Church who believe that the End of Days is here. So, rather than being convicted of heresy for his curiosity and mathematical prowess*, seventeen-year-old Luca Vero is ordered to head off into the countryside, where he will witness strange events and report back about them. Basically, he's a 15th century debunker.
Meanwhile, due to her father's last-minute** deathbed change of heart, the beautiful seventeen-year-old Lady Isolde suddenly finds herself—rather than the mistress of her family's lands—the newly appointed Abbess of the local convent. Even worse, shortly after she and Ishraq, her Moorish companion, arrive at the abbey, mysterious and troubling things begin to occur. Nuns are suddenly walking in their sleep, having visions, refusing to eat, falling ill, and perhaps most frightening of all, some of them are suddenly marked by stigmata.
The mystery of Lucretili Abbey is Luca's first case, and what a case it is! Compounding the difficulty of his charge, he's suddenly forced to deal with not one, but three extremely attractive young women—Lady Isobel the Abbess, Sister Ursula the Lady Almoner, and the formidable Ishraq—which is a task that may prove far more challenging than any amount of sleuthing.
So. Philippa Gregory's first YA novel. First things first: I've never read any of her work for adults, so I don't have a horse in this race. (Unless you count the Vaguely Suspicious Sideeye To Any Bestselling Adult Author Who Makes A Move On The YA Realm horse. I try not to let that sort of thing affect my opinion, of course, but it's always worth mentioning.)
The period, storyline, and action were all interesting and entertaining. The characters are likable enough, there's plenty of humor to balance out the darkness, and Gregory doesn't condescend to her readers by trying to sugarcoat the uglier aspects of the period. So that's good.
And yet.
There is no real life in it. No spark, no heart, no swoon, no swoop. The writing is perfectly serviceable—no howlers that I noticed—but it feels passionless and rote. The characters were likable, sure, but they were also completely stock: the Good Guy Hero, the Determined Yet Resigned Heroine, the Hero's Comedic Sidekick, the Heroine's Plucky (not to mention "Exotic/Other") Companion, the Fish-Lipped Slimeball, the Money-Hungry Villain. None of them ever becomes more than a walking trope.
The mystery... well, the solution of the mystery is so simplistic that A) Luca has the means to solve it before he's even been at the Abbey for twelve hours, and B) it is of such short, straightforward duration that a second, unrelated mystery fills out the last third the book.
Changeling was... okay.
And it was only okay.
Which is, you know, okay.
I mean, it could have been much worse.
Luca could have been the medieval Theodore Boone.
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*Note to self: when time-travelling, do not suggest to medieval folk that it's technically impossible for all of those "pieces of the true cross" to actually have belonged to the True Cross. It isn't likely to go over well.
**And very suspicious, considering the fact that the only person to witness it was her brother... who is now set to inherit everything.
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Author page.
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Book source: ILLed through my library. Okay, actually, someone else ILLed it. But I read it before sending it back.