Wednesday Book

Last night I finished the first volume in the series about Anglican priest Merrily Watkins by Phil Rickman. The title is Wine of Angels. It's been quite popular here at Holden and, although the books are generally only available in the UK and Canada, they keep them stocked in the bookstore. Rickman is more known for his rather dark suspense books - lots of ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night. This book brings in the not-so-savory past of a small English village in Herefordshire, a place famous for its cider. He bases his story on some real history that he documents nicely at the end.

It's a long song - 600+ pages. I stuck it out to the end to see what happened. The plot is pretty good, but the character development is weak - some of the evil exposed at the end doesn't seem to be showing up until then - and the characters do things that seem, well, out of character. I'd read something, and then find myself flipping back to see how this action ended up in this person. It just didn't make sense.

Merrily Watkins is rather annoying. She is the priest-in-charge at this village church, but she is just too, as the English would say, "wet." She has angst coming out of every pore, and she messes up so often I can't imagine they'll keep her on after this story. She has an uncle who is part of the the congregation, and he abandons her early on for no good reason that I could ascertain.

So I don't think I'll be reading the next installment. The author says there's no need to read in order, so if you see one around, you might want to give it a shot. Perhaps the others are better, but it seems to me a whole lot of pages for not much fiction.