Ahoy there me mateys!  I finished this book earlier this month but it has taken me some time to get my thoughts in order.  I think it's because of the unusual style of the novel.  The story is set in the 1100s in England.  Willem is a young peasant boy who lives with his parents in Cosham.  Unfortunately, he meets an untimely end.  His parents are distraught and visit a sorcerer named Cain Caradoc to do the unthinkable and ask for their son to be brought back to life.

This does not go well.  Willem has been dead for too long and is brought back in a monstrous form.  He is stuck in an in-between almost zombie-like fashion where he cannot die.  His parents and village are horrified and drive him out of the village.  Also Willem does not realize that the sorcerer has stolen a piece of his soul as the price for this resurrection.

Willem flees to the forest where he meets a variety of other monsters like water spirits and shapeshifters.  He makes a new life with this found family and has set his old life aside.  However, Caradoc plans an assault against Cosham with a focus on stealing the children.  The villagers ask Willem for help.  Willem's remaining humanity and compassion leads him to battle the sorcerer.

I found both the beginning and ending of the novel to be a lot of fun.  However, there were issues that led to this read being less than satisfying overall.  First is that the villagers are NOT nice people and I had a hard time caring about any of them given how selfish they acted.  It started to make me want them to suffer because of how nasty they were.  However, evil sorcerer should not win.  Also I don't like feeling hateful of characters that I should want to thrive.  Even the children had much better morals than their parents.

There were also massive issues with pacing and style of writing.  I was okayish up until the 73% mark when the book stalled big time.  I had to put down and pick up the book many times before I could keep going.  I did not get back into the flow of the story until the 91% mark,  Some of this was because of the non-linear timeline and side tangents that Willem went on.  Some of this was because of being tired of the archaic feel of the written and spoken language in the book.  Both of these things were very fun in the beginning but grew wearisome as the plot progressed.  It was other bloggers reviews that helped me finish as they said the ending was worth it.  I am not so sure even while I liked it.  Having, basically, that 18% of the book be hard going was substantial.  Also I think a lot of that section could have been trimmed down substantially.  Like the Hell and French parts.

I wonder if I would have liked this story a lot more had it been a longer novella for instance given that the style and story concepts were fun.  Plus I really did enjoy the characters of Willem, the water spirit, the village healer, and the girl in the stone.  It is a hard book to recommend given its unusual nature but if historical fantasy with monsters sounds good then give it a try.  Arrrrr!

I received a copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.