By Kathleen Kent (300 pages)
Published by Little, Brown
Bookish rating: 4
The Wolves of
Andover
is one of those books I read with less attention than it deserved. Read in
snippets as I waited in Mom-related waiting rooms and before falling asleep at
night, I wasn’t at my most discerning.
Whatever.
It’s a good book. Set in Massachusetts in the 1600s, it follows the evolving
relationship between Martha, a girl sent to live with her fussy cousin as a
servant, and Thomas, a man who fled to the colonies to escape certain death
after the English Civil War.
For
some reason, the English Civil War repeatedly fails to suck me in when I read
historical novels. But Kent is a talented writer and handles what apparently is
my least favorite war quite nicely.
Kent
has a good, believable eye for historical detail, and she hits a good balance
of readability and dialect. I’m not the biggest fan of dialect-heavy dialogue,
but she’s effective. I can “hear” the characters speak with what I’m imagining
our colonial or Welsh accents.
Characters
are fascinatingly complex and human, even the high-maintenance cousin (and
really, how fussy can you really be in the 1600s?). And I loved that our
heroine, Martha, is a prickly, sort of bitchy gal. I get it.
A
solid, historical novel, creatively, almost eerily, imagined. Recommended.
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