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A review by joaniesaltzman
Death Comes as Epiphany by Sharan Newman
3.0
Preemptive tl;dr: I recommend the Catherine LeVendeur mysteries for excellent medieval settings, strong character development and likable, engaging characters, and compelling writing of marginalized people, which can be hard to find.
I started this series with the seventh book, then the third, and then the first. I think the seventh book might have benefitted from having some previous context, but the first book certainly benefits by having read later books first. Knowing who Catherine is as an adult makes it very charming to meet her as a naïve eighteen-year-old, newly returned to the outside world from within a convent. I can see where, starting from the first book, her innocence, self-doubt and clumsiness would make her a tiring protagonist. There's really very little need to read in order, though, so just start with a later book and revisit young Catherine later.
I really only write reviews if other people's reviews annoy me, so here are the main complaints I saw: (1) It's poorly plotted and (2) No woman at the time could do these things. I actually can't speak to (1) because I just got into mystery very recently and I have very little to compare to (I read some other medieval mysteries last summer and that's it). I will say that one if the major draws for me in Newman's work is that, as a medievalist, her understanding of the medieval world is very rich, and she really brings medieval France to life in a way that the other medieval novels I've read don't.
The other major draw for me is her treatment of marginalized people in the setting. Catherine is an exceptional woman with exceptional privilege for the time, but the other women around her life with the expected constraints and that reality is something that Catherine runs up against often. In addition, [MINOR SPOILER] she discovers late in the novel that her father was born to a Jewish family and converted after the murder of his mother and sisters, and she has a Jewish aunt, uncle and cousin she was unaware of. [SPOILER ENDED.] In each novel I've read, conflicts between Jews and Christians sit close to the heart of the story.
Which brings me to (2) "No woman could do these things." So first, yes, you have to suspend some disbelief to read a novel about one woman in 12th century France solving ten murders. Just like how the towns in Father Brown and Murder, She Wrote would be insanely dangerous places to live based on the murder rates. There's an element of fiction to fiction. The idea of an exceptional woman carving a place for herself is not the fiction. Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Joan of Arc all managed to do exceptional things in a time of male dominance. Historical women were not as weak as we think they were. Historical women were not weaker or stupider than modern women. Catherine is ahead of her time, but there are always real people ahead of their times or we wouldn't get to these times. I like books that treat oppressed people with respect. Catherine is not a likely woman, but if Margery Kempe could get her husband to agree to abstinence (she did) then there's no reason to believe it's impossible for Catherine LeVendeur to get her father to let her read.
I started this series with the seventh book, then the third, and then the first. I think the seventh book might have benefitted from having some previous context, but the first book certainly benefits by having read later books first. Knowing who Catherine is as an adult makes it very charming to meet her as a naïve eighteen-year-old, newly returned to the outside world from within a convent. I can see where, starting from the first book, her innocence, self-doubt and clumsiness would make her a tiring protagonist. There's really very little need to read in order, though, so just start with a later book and revisit young Catherine later.
I really only write reviews if other people's reviews annoy me, so here are the main complaints I saw: (1) It's poorly plotted and (2) No woman at the time could do these things. I actually can't speak to (1) because I just got into mystery very recently and I have very little to compare to (I read some other medieval mysteries last summer and that's it). I will say that one if the major draws for me in Newman's work is that, as a medievalist, her understanding of the medieval world is very rich, and she really brings medieval France to life in a way that the other medieval novels I've read don't.
The other major draw for me is her treatment of marginalized people in the setting. Catherine is an exceptional woman with exceptional privilege for the time, but the other women around her life with the expected constraints and that reality is something that Catherine runs up against often. In addition, [MINOR SPOILER] she discovers late in the novel that her father was born to a Jewish family and converted after the murder of his mother and sisters, and she has a Jewish aunt, uncle and cousin she was unaware of. [SPOILER ENDED.] In each novel I've read, conflicts between Jews and Christians sit close to the heart of the story.
Which brings me to (2) "No woman could do these things." So first, yes, you have to suspend some disbelief to read a novel about one woman in 12th century France solving ten murders. Just like how the towns in Father Brown and Murder, She Wrote would be insanely dangerous places to live based on the murder rates. There's an element of fiction to fiction. The idea of an exceptional woman carving a place for herself is not the fiction. Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Joan of Arc all managed to do exceptional things in a time of male dominance. Historical women were not as weak as we think they were. Historical women were not weaker or stupider than modern women. Catherine is ahead of her time, but there are always real people ahead of their times or we wouldn't get to these times. I like books that treat oppressed people with respect. Catherine is not a likely woman, but if Margery Kempe could get her husband to agree to abstinence (she did) then there's no reason to believe it's impossible for Catherine LeVendeur to get her father to let her read.