Burial Rites by Hannah Kent (3.5 stars)

This feels like the True History of the Kelly Gang for Iceland. It is historical fiction based on the fate of Agnes Magnúsdóttir who was charged with murder and was the last person to be executed in Iceland in 1829. As a debut it is very impressive. The writing is outstanding, at times lyrical, and it provides a powerful portrait of the hardship of rural Iceland. Agnes grabs your attention from the very first sentence, this is the opening:

They said I must die. They said that I stole the breath from men, and now they must steal mine. I imagine then, that we are all candle flames, greasy-bright, fluttering in the darkness and the howl of the wind, and in the stillness of the room I hear footsteps, awful coming footsteps, coming to blow me out and send my life up away from me in a gray wreath of smoke.

The research undertaken by Kent for the novel must have been enormous: not only into the details of the murder case, trial, and execution, but also covering the lifestyle of rural Iceland in the 19th century. I enjoyed reading interesting and detailed accounts of wheat harvesting, sheep butchering, sausage making, etc. It was made abundantly clear that life was hard for pretty much everyone, and female servants not only worked hard in terrible conditions, but were the subject of much abuse with very little prospect for improvement. Winter was a physical and mental prison for many months of the year.

Despite all that praise I didn't find myself particularly invested in this novel. As best I can tell, this comes down to the character development because the writing was great, the setting was interesting, and the plot moved along nicely. Agnes-the-character wasn't nearly as interesting as Agnes-the-story, which was largely portrayed as a wrong-place wrong-time kind of affair. Natan seemed interesting as a character - conflicted, manipulative, and intelligent, but he is barely present in the story, just flitting in and out of Agnes' POV. I liked this quote:

Natan did not believe in sin. He said that it is the flaw in the character that makes a person.

An interesting read, and well-written.

3.5 stars

Divergent, Allegiant, Insurgent by Veronica Roth (3 stars)

One of many, many attempts to write another Hunger Games, the Divergent series is very entertaining but horribly flawed. First take the hunger games, remove the world-building, get the Hogwarts sorting hat to carve the world up into houses, and add a splash of Ender's game training montage.

This young adult fiction got me through a few bad days of being stuck at home while sick, and I'm grateful for the entertainment, but I'm just going to review these quickly and do all three together because they are nothing amazing.



The good:

• It's a dystopia (I'm a sucker)
• No love triangle! One starts to appear at one point but it gets killed off (pun intended) quickly and fairly dramatically.
• Female and male protagonists aren't breathtakingly beautiful, perfectly proportioned goddesses and gods (I'm looking at you Twilight). Roth goes out of her way to point out imperfections and emphasize that Tris and Four are not at the top of the prettiness pecking-order on a number of occasions.

The bad:

• The world building is almost completely absent, and where it exists it doesn't make sense. Why do Abnegation perpetuate this horrible caste system that keeps the Factionless opressed when their main goal is to look after the Factionless? What does everyone do exactly - i.e. the Dauntless. What are they guarding the fence for? Why don't people try to escape the fence? Who is forcing everyone to obey the Faction system? The Salvation Army-like Abnegation running the government may be the least plausible governmental system I have ever imagined.
• The serums are a crutch. Roth comes up with some imaginative virtual reality scenarios in the Dauntless training, but it becomes clear that all the Dauntless training to overcome fears is actually pointless. If you wanted them to do something scary you could just use the mind control serum.
• There's a fairly disturbing anti-intellectual thread running through the series.
• Tris is actually a really boring POV. She is hopelessly caught up in trying to get accepted into her faction, and doesn't care to question the status quo. Her outlook gets a little more interesting in later books.
• The Tobias POV is horrible. It reads with an identical cadence to Tris, like they were the same person inside, and provides absolutely no significant insights or differences in perspective. I found myself often having to flick back to see which POV I was reading.
• The Bureau and genetic purity backstory is really weak and just not that interesting.

3 stars.