Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
Well this made me cry at the end. I so wanted a different ending. Which to me is often a sign of a very good book. You hope for a different outcome even though you know it’s not possible. “Burial Rites” is a historical fiction novel based on true events. We follow the final days of a young woman named Agnes Magnúsdóttir, found guilty of murder and sentenced to be beheaded in Iceland in 1829. The book follows many characters and you get most of them […]
Devotion by Hannah Kent
Devotion is a gloriously beautiful, heartbreaking story of impossible, indestructible love. Hanne is a girl becoming a woman in a community of Lutheran extremists in 19th century Prussia. She has never doubted her family’s faith, but feels a deep spiritual and synaesthetic connection to the natural world, hearing an underlying hum of music. “Baptise me in rainfall and crown me in sunrise.” “I could hear the sunshine ringing like a blow to the ear.” Hanne’s oddness is a barrier to friendship with the other girls of […]
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
This was the second book that the marvelous and generous faintingviolet got for me last year during the Holiday Book Exchange. This book is outside of what I usually pick up to read, but I’m thankful that I gave it a chance. Agnes Magnusdottir has been convicted of murder and sentenced to die in the early 1800s of Iceland. While she awaits her execution she is sent to live with a district official and his family. There’s his wife Margret, a very sick woman who […]
I’m excited to jump into these two books in the next few weeks. They’ll be my first two reviews of CBR22 in the new year. Books are If We Were Villains by M. L. Rios and Burial Rites by Hannah Kent. These books have been blessed by my patron saints Liz Lemon, Beyoncé, and Shea Couleé.
I love physical books. Aside from not being able to read e-books for any sustained period of time, I love the look and feel of physical books and wish every room in my home were lined with shelves that I could fill with a never-ending stream of new books. Hannah Kent’s The Good People is one of the most gorgeous physical books I’ve ever seen, with the murky underwater blues and teals overlaid with a metallic copper leaf that partially obscures the title and amplifies […]
“To know what a person has done, and to know who a person is, are very different things.” I have had a bit of luck with first time authors of late, and Hannah Kent is no exception. Her debut work, Burial Rites, is a gripping novel- all mood and emotion. It’s a story gaining speed like a stone rolling downhill, for there is only one way to go. Ms. Kent writes in Burial Rites about the last instance of capital punishment in Iceland. But I […]
