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This never quite opened up for me� It’s a medieval girlboss fantasia set almost entirely in an abbey, loosely based on the little that’s known about Marie de France. This Marie is kicked out of the French royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine and sent to run the abbey at age seventeen. That’s about where the real hardships for Marie end. The abbey is poor when she gets there, and over the course of the book we see her turn it into a rich and profitable abbey. Mild threats from the Queen to tax them higher are somehow easily evaded. Conflict comes and goes like that, showing up in little bursts and soon being overcome by Marie’s tall-tale-like ingenuity and power. The story is told at a distance, spanning the whole lifetime of Marie, so I understand from an efficiency perspective not wanting to get into any one challenge she faced. But, for me, a boredom set in halfway through that didn’t ever leave. It’s hard to be engaged if you know that any trouble that comes her way will quickly and often unbelievably be tossed off with ease. Towers go up despite protests, attackers are defeated with hardly any loss or pain to the nuns, sexism is seemingly done away with when the townspeople and the church leaders and everyone else behold the power of Marie. It makes the novel feel cartoonish, like a superhero story without a compelling villain. A reader is supposed to have the same awe that the fellow nuns do, but it’s one thing to be told you should feel awe and another thing to feel it. I think it’s a great project to tell a story about medieval women without the usual doom and gloom, but it does a disservice to focus so much on the magical exceptionality of Marie. Like any story about exceptions overcoming the oppression of their groups, there’s a risk of making it seem like—well, if this one person can do all that, then isn’t every other person’s oppression kind of a fault of their shortcomings? I.e. while trying to do a feminist reclamation, it has whiffs of a conservative bootstrap tale. Without realistic, believable, grounded conflict, it’s hard to put the awe you're supposed to have for Marie in perspective.