This was quite great. I was actually quite (pleasantly) surprised how time is treated. It jumps and skips playfully forward at times, and does so exactly when needed. Our protagonist could have dwelled in her laborious solitude when relegated to the abbey for ages upon ages, and you could imagine a writer using the structure to make the reader really feel that time. When it jumps forward at a certain point I was put off balance at first, then felt extremely grateful for the framing of the story being as it is.

It feels crisp and pertinent. Not a single page or line is wasted. The prose are great. The character work, similarly fantastic. Even the pious have character flaws, and it turns out there was a lot more politicking in an Abbey than I ever imagined. But because I wasn’t aware of that at all, it felt new again and easily accommodated. Absolutely every aspect of this was interesting.

While it does miss the X factor to bump it to a 5 star read for me, it did, obviously, exceed my expectations. I think there is a distance, which is necessary for the framing to work, but does make it more difficult to appreciate at a character level. Or perhaps I was too busy marvelling and the craft work in the structure.