Reviews

Hild by Nicola Griffith

Only show reviews with written explanations

yourfavavery's review

adventurous tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

So this story somewhat defies a summary. I came to it via an author's panel at a Con centered around "comfort reads for the end of the world". It was suggested as comforting because Hild (the daughter of a post-Roman Anglican king) despite her age, always manages to be the smartest, most competent, and politically savviest person in the room, and she's taken seriously for it despite her age and gender in a repressive time.

This book has been described as Game-of-Thronsian, and I get the comparison. It's very detailed and descriptive, and has the complicated politics of the time (which makes Hild valuable to the King). It also has an element of religious colonization as the Roman Catholic church aims to wipe out the existing pagan gods of the isle.

Be warned, however. This books has a LOT of characters and settings, often with very similar names. You'll be lost for a while, but if you make use of the map and family tree you'll start to catch on. Read this if you like Dune Messiah or A Game of Thrones or The Lord of the Rings, or any high fantasy with dense world-building.

timinbc's review against another edition

Go to review page

4.0

Nebula Award nominee, and it's not really either SF or F.
Often frustrating, but still a masterful piece of work.

He sat down to write a review. His hand fell to the grip of his seax. He looked out at the late-spring trees, where the blossoming pogarups heralded a good beef crop and cheerful chickadicks with their "twee-twee" indicated a probable rise in barometric pressure over the next week, with impact on the Baltic shrimp harvest, which worried him because with all the boats out shrimping it would be hard to get jute to make carpets with her cousin Aerbreyk, daughter of Haertbyrn, a dark-complexioned girl with long eyelashes, which when she blinked them made him realize that her - Aerbreyk's - wyrd was to marry Aethleet, son of Reebok, in order to keep the Fraggles from allying with the Grorps to drive Pragmatix the Pict out of the meme wood and back across the wolds to the high moors where the thesauri roamed free.

This wasn't getting his review done. He stood up. He was even taller than he had been two pages ago, and was growing so fast that by the end of the review he'd be getting calls from the NBA, if it existed, and just then a beetle scuttled across the floor. A slight imperfection in its shell triggered a flash of insight, and - gripping his seax - he realized that his sons' sons' sons' sons' sons would indeed play in the Euro League, and someday one of them would be a second-round pick of the Pistons, whatever those were, so that someone in Britain ought to get working on inventing sneakers. He wondered how Hild would sell that to Edwin king.

He started typing. He mentioned Griffith's obviously deep research, her odd but fascinating characters - not least of which is Fursey, the Irish priest who would be right at home in a Flann O'Brien novel set in 1947.

Hild is smarter than the average bear, and learns everything with astonishing speed. She figures out what will happen and is never wrong. Made me think of Kvothe from Patrick Rothfuss. Wasn't long before I wanted her to be wrong, and not much longer before I wanted her to be spectacularly wrong. But no. Except once, near the end, when after 187 straight she botches one that

Spoiler

is about her own future.

Which is odd, because the rest of us sure saw it coming about 600 pages earlier.

The reviewer took a break. It was bedtime, but he couldn't sleep, so he went outside, sat on a grassy bank, and - still in Griffith mode - exhaustively enumerated every species of plant and animal that would be in that area at that season, then provided a lengthy explanation of what the local people would make that season, what they would make it from, and how they would manage their farms and smithies and dairies. He didn't sleep. Heroic characters rarely sleep or eat.

Returning to his desk, seax on his hip, the very tall reviewer - taller than he was two paragraphs ago, what a marvel - decided to read some more of the book he was reviewing, and picked up a detailed account of the displacement of the pagan religions by the greedy, stone-obsessed Christian bishops. Amazingly still awake, he read on, through a quite-interesting thread throughout the book about women behind the scenes manipulating their men into doing the right thing.

Not to mention quite a few scenes of women manipulating other women, ahem, while the men were off drinking and fighting. Well handled, but if you don't like that sort of thing you have been warned.

But still. Many of the characters actually lived, and in general the politics and fighting happened more or less as described, and we get a good look at how people at various levels made their way in society.

If you liked Connie Willis's Doomsday Book you'll probably like this. Just don't look for spaceships or time travel or enchanted swords.

If you don't have some background in British history AND a big vocabulary, get a good dictionary and keep it at hand as you read. There's a short glossary but it covers maybe a twentieth of the old words that appear here.

Will I read books 2 & 3? I really don't know. I may be too tall by then, and I may have outgrown my seax.

But this one? I think maybe you should read it, and even if you don't like it much, just keep reading because it grows on you a bit and you will certainly learn a whole bunch.

marpar12's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous challenging inspiring medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

One of the most gripping and moving books I’ve ever read. I have been enthusiastically recommending it to anyone who will listen. It’s complicated and difficult in parks, shocking in others, but written in a way you can flow with the story as it moves beautifully.

Content Warnings

kellygoesgeocaching's review against another edition

Go to review page

2.0

I saw this book when it was part of a book club and was interested and finally had the chance to pick it up this week. I couldn't get anywhere with it though - the family tree at the front seems essential but I just couldn't follow it, the plot eluded me and I really just didn't feel anything for anyone in it. I just simply had to put it down because I'd gotten too far into it to be wasting more time not enjoying it.

tregina's review against another edition

Go to review page

3.0

I read this on the recommendation of several of my friends, and while it was excellent historically and Hild of course is a wonderful woman to focus a book on, it all just didn't seem to add up to as much as I hoped. Where its strength was is definitely the historical detail (though it tended to excess in this area) and in the gentle passage of time, the way we saw the characters growing older and changing rather than were told that they aged; I've rarely seen it done so smoothly or skillfully.