Book Review: The Starving Saints

Image: the cover is a black background rimmed in gold with a painting of a religious saint in the center, a gold sun behind her head, draped in cloth from head to toe, with orange hands holding up a square partition from a beehive. Inside the face of the saint are painted three small faces in shades of pink and red with their mouths open. Across the top in pink Old English style lettering is the title of the book. At the bottom in white letters is Caitlin Starling - author of the death of Jane Lawrence.

I almost passed on Caitlin Starling's The Starving Saints. Medieval stories usually aren't my jam. I have enjoyed Starling's other work and this one seemed surreal and insane enough to give it a shot. The cover is also fantastic. I am very glad I picked this one up. 

So many reviewers referred to this book as a fever dream and they were not kidding. The world building in this book is excellent and the build up to the more fantastical of the horror aspects is complete with real life horrors of the time. I could imagine myself there, with the smells, sights, growling insides, and uncertainty. The desperation of starvation and war is clear while also transporting the reader into a time in history that none of us have ever touched. 

Starling manages to navigate historical fiction and fantasy in a way that feels very real. I not only pictured the characters in this story, but also people throughout these histories who committed their own myths and explanations for events around them to writing. Without the sort of scientific knowledge that we have these days, people came up with descriptions for things that made sense given the knowledge or belief systems of the time. I imagined what these people must have felt and thought while trying to understand the world around them. I imagined the sense of betrayal the religious must have felt when atrocities abounded regardless of how hard they prayed. This book does very well to capture all of that. It is a story of how those assumptions can be turned against people. 

I'm being as deliberately vague as possible as so much happens in this story that is best for the reader to experience without having read about it beforehand. One note I want to make is that the queer aspects of this story were quite enmeshed and believable. There are often criticisms from people, even in the realms of fantasy where you have flying lizards, that certain stories remain unbelievable when characters of certain demographics are included. I really liked the way Starling included a variety of strong, queer, and flawed women. Much like her other book that I read, The Luminous Dead, the theme of conflict and betrayal between women is there. There is darkness, light, and everything in between all the way to the end. 

This was also posted to my goodreads and Storygraph.