A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge

A Skinful of Shadows

3/5. Tale of Makepeace, illegitimate daughter of an ancient english noble family. She can see ghosts, and she gets possessed by a bear, and it’s 1641 and there’s a war coming.

My Hardinge standards are so unfairly high that this, a really very good and creepy historical fantasy, is judged as average because it didn’t blow my face off. It really is good – Hardinge has such a great line on angry girls who furiously survive while the world tries to beat them down. And there’s a ghost bear. And this book is doing stuff with the inheritance of power, the concentration of it in families, in ghosts who refuse to go, in kings, in governments.

But it didn’t blow my face off, because I was just not in the mood for a historical fantasy that leans quite so much on the historical part. And I think because Makepeace does a lot, suffers a lot, for a boy (brother, not boyfriend) who frankly doesn’t deserve to wipe her boots for her, and I get why she does it, he’s the only person human she has to love so by God she will. But that didn’t make it fun to read about. She should have just run off with her ghost bear and had a better life and damn them all.