bloodygranuaile

I have had this copy of Frances Mary Hendry’s Quest for a Maid in my possession for approximately a hundred billion years, or at least 25, as the inside cover features an ancient address and an ancient phone number. I have distinct childhood memories of starting it on multiple occasions, but it’s hung out on my “to-read” shelf since I started separating books into read and to-read shelves, as I cannot for the life of me remember if I ever finished it or not. It’s a middle grade book of the sort of early-medieval girl’s historical fiction that constituted many of my favorite childhood reads, like Wise Child and Catherine Called Birdie, and that has continued to fascinate me as an adult with books like Hild. So it seemed like a good candidate for like, escapist bathtub reading.

For a middle grade book, it took me entirely too many baths to get through, especially given that I tend to take two-hour baths. I’m once again not really sure why. It’s certainly not that it was too hard to read, like it might have been back when I first got it; it’s a middle-grade book. Something about it just tended to not draw me in as much as books that are exactly like this generally do and seem like they ought to. I can’t identify anything particularly wrong with it, I just kept not being real hooked. I got a little more invested near the end, once a bunch of shipwrecks got involved, but I didn’t really care about any of the characters except sometimes the Maid; they all just sort of came off as collections of meticulously researched 13th century Scottish lifestyle accessories. And I say this as someone who generally would be quite interested in meticulously researched 13th century Scottish lifestyle accessories! I think some of the difficulty with getting into it might be that if you’re going to talk that much about clothing that doesn’t exist anymore, it might be useful to have pictures or something, so that I don’t spend so much mental energy trying to visualize the difference between a garde-corps and a cote-hardie, or trying to differentiate between all the terrible medieval hats. I cannot google “barbette” in the bath, the point of reading in the bath is to get away from my google machines, and I certainly can’t remember what a “barbette” is no matter how much medieval nonsense I read, because I hate hats too much. Usually this does not bother me that much, but something about this book had me unusually bored for a book about a girl whose older sister is a regicidal witch and who constantly winds up in near-death scrapes.