A Season of Monstrous Conceptions, Lina Rather
Received to review via Netgalley
I really liked Lina Rather’s previous novellas, so I leapt on this one even without reading what it was about. It follows Sarah Davis, an apprentice midwife who is more than a little uncanny herself, in a year when uncanny children are being born all over London. By chance, she meets Sir Christopher Wren’s wife, who is pregnant, and becomes her midwife — and thus gets drawn more and more into the strangeness, tugged between Sir Christopher’s ambitions for her uncanny powers, and those of the midwives she works with.
It’s an interesting setup, and I liked that the motivations of everyone had some justification behind them. Everyone thinks they’re a hero and doing the right thing, in their own head, and I could see that these characters did too.
As a novella, it doesn’t get into an enormous amount of depth with most of the characters, but Sarah is pretty clear, and her fledgeling relationship with Margaret, and the liminal world of almost-respectable, almost-unrespectable that she inhabits and struggles with.
I love Sisters of the Vast Black more, but I’m glad I picked this up!
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