A SEASON MOST UNFAIR

In medieval England, Tick (short for Scholastica) has spent her childhood helping her chandler father make candles and wax charms to sell.

The annual Stourbridge Fair near Cambridge brings in the bulk of their year’s earnings. But when Papa takes on a boy as an apprentice, Tick finds herself pushed away, relegated to helping with the cooking, cleaning, and gardening. Tick resents this, feels rejected by her father, and decides she does not want to grow up or, as she puts it in the story’s first-person, present-tense narration, become “young-womanly.” The description “young-womanly” reappears many times as Tick grapples with gender expectations. She observes her friend Johanna no longer being hugged by her father since she became “rounder in her womanly places”; Tick wonders if the same thing will happen with her father, a concern that is conveyed in a way that might feel to readers uncomfortably close to sexualizing the father-daughter relationship. When Tick defies her father and makes her wax charms to sell at the fair without his knowledge, the frequency of her often repeated assertion that her father will be grateful and realize how indispensable she is undermines any tension that may have otherwise built up. The work includes some archaic phrases and words, and the olfactory challenges of the time period are vividly conveyed, but overall the worldbuilding feels thin, and the story fails to compel.

A flat story of a girl challenging the limitations society puts on her.