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book rec: The Cobbler’s Boy
Nov. 12th, 2019 02:35 pmvia https://ift.tt/2NERTsB
I read this book because I loved the Goblin Emperor and it’s the only other thing that came up when I searched my library’s Libby app for Katherine Addison’s name. Behind the cut: a brief summary and review.
She cowrote this with Elizabeth Bear. The Cobbler’s Boy is a fictional story about Christopher Marlowe as a 15-year-old boy, trying to figure out what to do with his life– he has a gift for scholarship, but is the only son of a drunk, abusive cobbler with four daughters and a new baby on the way, and he knows he’s not likely to get a chance at further schooling. His friend John Lattimore is a scholar who he hopes will teach him Greek and help him attain a prestigious scholarship, and he has a young friend, a classmate, a boy, for whom he is beginning to realize he has… certain feelings.
Into the midst of all this, comes a murder plot, interlaced with court politics (Elizabeth vs. Mary Queen of Scots! v exciting) far beyond Kit’s understanding, and his only chance is to solve the mystery or his father will be hanged for it.
It’s a fun, sort of YA-feeling story, with high stakes, affecting detail, good characterizations (even the drunken father is not a monster, you do understand him, even if you don’t like him)– and it has some of the same things I loved about the Goblin Emperor, where Kit is the POV character and so the world is expertly filtered through the things he’d notice, colored by his experiences.
And it manages, despite the setting, to not be a Sad Gay Story– the boys realize they could be burned at the stake for their feelings, but they also seem to realize that they can still carve out some joy for themselves, perhaps.
So, I recommend it if you’re looking for some fun Feelings; I breezed through it rather quickly. Good distinct characters, I had no trouble keeping track of his variety of sisters and the other characters, which is a nice change from another book I’m reading where I honestly don’t know which of the two main characters is narrating at any given time and I don’t know either of their names and I’m over a quarter of the way through the book. Maybe I won’t review that one.
I wished there was a little more of the setting– I don’t know much about Canterbury circa 1600, but as Kit isn’t prone to gazing about the place (as he’s never lived anywhere else), you don’t see much, and probably it would have been clunky to include. I guess I can look that up on my own, if I want to know more.
I read this book because I loved the Goblin Emperor and it’s the only other thing that came up when I searched my library’s Libby app for Katherine Addison’s name. Behind the cut: a brief summary and review.
She cowrote this with Elizabeth Bear. The Cobbler’s Boy is a fictional story about Christopher Marlowe as a 15-year-old boy, trying to figure out what to do with his life– he has a gift for scholarship, but is the only son of a drunk, abusive cobbler with four daughters and a new baby on the way, and he knows he’s not likely to get a chance at further schooling. His friend John Lattimore is a scholar who he hopes will teach him Greek and help him attain a prestigious scholarship, and he has a young friend, a classmate, a boy, for whom he is beginning to realize he has… certain feelings.
Into the midst of all this, comes a murder plot, interlaced with court politics (Elizabeth vs. Mary Queen of Scots! v exciting) far beyond Kit’s understanding, and his only chance is to solve the mystery or his father will be hanged for it.
It’s a fun, sort of YA-feeling story, with high stakes, affecting detail, good characterizations (even the drunken father is not a monster, you do understand him, even if you don’t like him)– and it has some of the same things I loved about the Goblin Emperor, where Kit is the POV character and so the world is expertly filtered through the things he’d notice, colored by his experiences.
And it manages, despite the setting, to not be a Sad Gay Story– the boys realize they could be burned at the stake for their feelings, but they also seem to realize that they can still carve out some joy for themselves, perhaps.
So, I recommend it if you’re looking for some fun Feelings; I breezed through it rather quickly. Good distinct characters, I had no trouble keeping track of his variety of sisters and the other characters, which is a nice change from another book I’m reading where I honestly don’t know which of the two main characters is narrating at any given time and I don’t know either of their names and I’m over a quarter of the way through the book. Maybe I won’t review that one.
I wished there was a little more of the setting– I don’t know much about Canterbury circa 1600, but as Kit isn’t prone to gazing about the place (as he’s never lived anywhere else), you don’t see much, and probably it would have been clunky to include. I guess I can look that up on my own, if I want to know more.
