Review: Daughter of Black Lake

Daughter of Black Lake is Cathy Marie Buchanan's third novel and, if you can believe it, the first one that I've read. She's a Canadian historical fiction author who has been on my radar since her second book, The Painted Girls, published back in 2012. But I just hadn't gotten around to reading her - so many books, so little time, am I right? I'm glad I had a chance to read this latest one, thanks to HarperCollins Canada, as it was a beautifully written novel set in a time I had never read about before.

Here's the book's description:

It's the season of Fallow, in the era of iron. In a northern misty bog surrounded by woodlands and wheat fields, a settlement lies far beyond the reach of the Romans invading hundreds of miles to the southeast. Here, life is simple--or so it seems to the tightly knit community. Sow. Reap. Honor Mother Earth, who will provide at harvest time. A girl named Devout comes of age, sweetly flirting with the young man she's tilled alongside all her life, and envisions a future of love and abundance. Seventeen years later, though, the settlement is a changed place. Famine has brought struggle, and outsiders, with their foreign ways and military might, have arrived at the doorstep. For Devout's young daughter, life is more troubled than her mother ever anticipated. But this girl has an extraordinary gift. As worlds collide and peril threatens, it will be up to her to save her family and community.

The book is told from two viewpoints. The first is Hobble in her present day as a Druid comes to their village and stirs up unease, just as another Druid had in Hobble's mother's youth. Devout is her mother and her part of the story is in the past, which gives the reader a greater understanding of the distrust the villagers have of Druids, even if it's never outwardly spoken. That distrust culminates in a super intense scene at the end of the book and I definitely gasped and yelled YES (to myself) as villagers stood up for what was right.

The book was set in the Iron Age in what we now know as Great Britain. At least, I'm fairly certain that's the setting. Because it's so incredibly ancient (anywhere between 800 BC to 43 AD), it's hard to pin down. Normally I read a lot of WWII era historical fiction and that is really easy to piece together since I've read so much of it and it's recent-ish history. While the world Hobble and her parents live in is quite different than ours, there are still a lot of similarities. Humans haven't changed all that much in the last...well, freaking long time. There are still the base desires and needs which I think we've started paying attention to A LOT more during the last year and a half with the pandemic. 

I wouldn't necessarily say I really liked Daughter of Black Lake but Cathy Marie Buchanan's latest novel, which was published last fall, is really well done. It's exceptionally well written and allows the reader to get a glimpse into the lives of ancient humans, which was quite fascinating. This novel is for you if you like your historical fiction to be more literary.

*An ARC of this novel was provided by HarperCollins Canada in exchange for review consideration. All opinions are honest and my own.*