Sarah Oldfield

Pillars was a great book and I recommend it highly. The Evening and the Morning might be a good one to skip. It starts really well but disintegrates about half way through. It feels like the author was running out of time to publish and cheapened the story. The characters feel very similar to those from Pillars and I did not really have a problem with that much. I did however get sick of the tropes as the story wore on. Wynstan is far too omniscient for a person of the time and becomes a villain from a melodrama. Ragna is a cheap foil for the male characters and loses all of the depth that was set up in the beginning of the story. All of the characters lose their depth by the end and I was left feeling like I wasted my time. I gave this book two stars because the beginning was good and there might be a nugget of historical relevance in that this Dark Ages novel left the reader feeling violated and desperate for something better.