The Witches of Vardo by Anya Bergman

You know, I think I may have read too many historical novels because I'm starting to get a little underwhelmed by them. This is not a bad book, and the quality of writing is good, but somehow it failed to hit the spot and I ended up feeling that it was a little over-stuffed.

The book is almost four hundred pages in length, but I recon you could safely chip away about a quarter of it and still have a workable story. It's another one of those 'Quest' type novels where everyone is living a happy life, then some great injustice is done that puts one of the key characters in peril, then everyone else has to put themselves in danger on a misguided rescue mission.

The story is set in Norway in the mid sixteen hundreds when everyone believed in witches and witchcraft, and every time something bad happened, an innocent woman had to be declared a witch and burned at the stake. In this case, a regional governor has declared that he will rid Vardo of all the witches he claims to have discovered living in the fishing village, and before long he has imprisoned a group of women and girls.

All the prisoners are thrown into the 'witches hole' that is nothing but a hole in the ground with no light and the space is deathly cold in the depths of the Norwegian winter. The women are required to confess before they can be executed and anyone who refuses to admit to their crimes is threatened with torture in the basement of the fortress.

This is very much a tale about female strength and bonding and there are no knights in shining armour riding to the rescue. There is one decent young man who provides the love interest, but the rest are psychopaths, liars and cowards whose only purpose in the book is to cause all the problems.

Large sections of the book are in the form of letters from a banished noblewoman to the king and these are all apparently written in lemon juice to keep the contents safe from prying eyes. The lemons came as a gift from the king and he must have sent a great many of them as they are constantly being eaten and the letters are very long but I guess they keep well in the cold weather.

As I said at the start, this is not a stand-out novel, but neither is it a bad one, so if you are interested in the historic treatment of witches then this will be for you.

Comments

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