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A beautifully woven story with wonderful writing on nature, traditions, superstition, ignorance and the human character. A moody, forceful and elemental gem!

..her indifference spread and stiffened, poured slowly over everything like lava down a mountain, obliterating all terror and concern and affection, until there was nothing left in sight. Emotionally, she thought, it must be rather like lying down in the snow to sleep - and didn't care about that, either.

Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there. That gnaws away at the night-time hours desperate for a sign and appears at breakfast so self-composed. That longs for certainty, fidelity, compassion and plays roulette with anything precious.

Cora was not entirely sure: ammonites and toadstones she knew well enough, and the shocking white curl of a shark's tooth biting through its lump of clay; she knew the puffed and spiny echinoid when she saw it, and the flared ribs of a trilobite...

I'm taking a break from this novel. It's not the violence, but I'm struggling with this now. Dare I say that I'm losing interest! It started off as a five star, but I need to stop just now and maybe return later.

They took to riding by night, silent jornadas save for the trundling of the wagons and the wheeze of the animals. Under the moonlight a strange party of elders with the white dust thick on their moustaches and their eyebrows. They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to know the nightskies well.

As she spoke, the sky to the left turned angry orange. Colour throbbed and mounted behind a pattern of trees, grew in intensity, was yet brighter, incredibly brighter, strained from without against the globe of the air. They awaited the miracle.

And that was exactly what I wanted - my emotions passing like headlights that shine softly through a window, sweep past me, illuminate something vaguely familiar, then fade and leave me in the dark again.

This was close reasoning; but it was commingled with an infinite amount of merely instinctive penitence. Catherine's days at this time were dismal, and the weight of some of her hours were almost more than she could bear. Her father never looked at her, never spoke to her. He knew perfectly what he was about, and this was part of a plan.

Struggling on... with this novel, so far. I think it's a mistake buy for me.

I liked my connection with her, through the words of the story. I relied on it. I felt as though I had reached back through time, down through the pages of the book, and taken hold of her hand. But I must give her up. I won't read the book again for many years.

The morals to resist didn't come very often anymore. That was for people like Henri III of France, after his wife the Princesse de Conde died. There was devotion, Henri sitting in his library the rest of his life, with his memories of the Princesse, creating designs of skulls and crossbones for Nicolas Eve to put on book covers and title pages for him. Henri would probably be called psychotic by modern psychiatrists.