Sin Eater

 Hello Interwebs!

Also in October I read Sin Eater by Megan Campisi and to be honest this is book was not at all like I was expecting. The description struck me as a sort of Dark Fantasy but it was more of an alternate history/mystery novel. That being said, despite it being not what I expected I still enjoyed it a lot and gave it a solid 4/5 stars. As always there are spoilers following the picture. 

In this book we follow May, a young peasant girl in Tudor England. She is an orphan and is arrested for stealing food and held in prison to be sentenced alongside other girls who have committed similar crimes. The punishments are swift and harsh but when May is impudent in court she is sent back to the jail without being sentenced. Finally they come for her and in the courtroom she is sentenced to become a Sin Eater. A sin eater is a woman who eats ritual foods to take the sins of others onto themselves so that people will go to heaven despite their sins. They lock a collar onto her throat and tattoo an S onto her tongue to mark her as a sin eater and send her out into the world with nothing and no help. She ends up finding her way to the Sin Eater's home and the silent woman takes her in as a kind of apprentice. They don't speak unless its the ritual words during the confessions and the ritual eating during funerals. 

They exist in silence together for a time and then at a eating for a former royal governess that they had heard confession from a deer's heart appears. Hearts are for murder and the governess had confessed to nothing of the kind. The elder Sin Eater refuses to eat the heart for the unconfessed sin and is taken away. May eats the heart and finds herself on her own. The same thing happens again after the death of a second royal servant and May finds that the other sin eater had been killed during her interrogation. May finds herself tossed into a royal mystery trying to discover why these deer hearts are appearing on coffins when they weren't confessed to. 

At the same time a pair of vagabonds appear in her home, having broken in while she was out and she lets them exist with her. Former performers, a woman with leprosy and a man with an ugly and scarred face. They bring more people and one of them reads the book of sins to her until she discovers that a deer's heart is specifically for the murder of a royal baby. She also befriends a Jewish violin maker who eventually removes her collar for her so she can take it off and put it on in turn.

Through much sneaking back and forth she discovers that the royal servants were said to have murdered the Queen's illegitimate baby at her behest when her stepmother was on her deathbed. It isn't until she corners someone she thinks is guilty (and is guilty of witchcraft) that she discovers the truth, that the Queen's stepmother, the dowager Queen died in childbirth and her baby with her. While the Queen's illegitimate child replaced the baby that died and raised as the late dowager Queen's baby. The murders of the servants are being committed by that child now grown who didn't know who she really was. Ultimately May escapes the court and its secrets and lies, roaming from town to town, falling in with other sin eaters in other places as it suits her. 

I really enjoyed this book. I liked the historical setting and the way it explored something that happened in history that doesn't get talked about. Sin eaters were real and it's something I didn't know existed until I looked into it more reading this book. This book takes a lot of historical liberties with the real history but it approaches it as a sort of alternate history. The one thing I didn't really like was the exploration of May's past and why she was sentenced to be a sin eater. It distracted from the mystery and seemed unnecessary in the end. The story could've unfolded just as easily if she had been selected to be a sin eater due to her outbursts in court as opposed to the convoluted story line taking place as an afterthought in which she was the illegitimate child of the magistrate's brother. But aside from that the book was highly enjoyable and I gave it a nice 4/5 stars. 

Happy Reading!

Richelle