DAUGHTER OF BLACK LAKE

Coming-of-age in Roman-occupied Britain.

Thirteen-year-old Hobble lives with her parents in a small, isolated community at the edge of a bog. Far from the eastern coast, their lives are largely untouched by Emperor Claudius’ desire to claim all of Britannia for Rome. But Hobble knows that this is about to change, because the young seer has had a vision of Romans coming to Black Lake. Her mother, Devout, has bitter recollections of an earlier incursion—and her experiences during that time will have a profound effect on Hobble’s fate. The stories of both daughter and mother unfold in alternating chapters. Buchanan devotes many, many pages to worldbuilding, at the expense of advancing the narrative. Nevertheless, Black Lake and the broader first-century Britain around it never feel like more than a stage set. The characters are mostly flat as well. Devout’s first love, Arc, is representative in that he fits a type but lacks specificity. He is, like Devout, a member of their community’s lowest caste but he is, apparently, singular because he knows “the industry of bees and the magnificence of the nighttime sky.” Contemporary clichés like this don’t do much to help a reader find their way back into an imagined past. The book succeeds best at recalling other books, most particularly Manda Scott’s Dreaming the Serpent Spear. Both authors use Lindow Man—a body uncovered by peat diggers in Northwest England in 1984—in strikingly similar ways. The most distinctive element of Buchanan’s novel is the druid Fox. Historical fiction set in pre-Christian Britain often depicts druids as fonts of ancestral wisdom, as spiritual savants attuned to nature. Fox is not that. He is, instead, a greedy, power-hungry zealot who murders puppies and, ultimately, demands human sacrifice. Beyond this unpleasant character, this novel is unremarkable.

A slog through the bog.