Melinda Salisbury, The Sin Eater’s Daughter, Scholastic, 1 March 2015, 336pp. $16.99 (pbk), ISBN 978 176015 157 7
The Sin Eater’s Daughter is an auspicious debut novel for young English writer, Melinda Salisbury. A native of a land steeped in mythology and legend, its landscape dotted with vestiges of medieval civilization, it is perhaps unsurprising that Salisbury has located her imagination and fiction in that era. It is a slow, absorbing present tense, first person read as the world of 17yo protagonist Twylla is convincingly constructed in detail with her residence in the royal court, the rituals and mythology that have placed her in the exalted, untouchable position as the embodiment of the gods on earth, and the suspicions and rivalries that dare prevail in the presence of the ruthless, manipulative Queen of Lormere.
Twylla reluctantly but obediently accepts her selection by the Queen as Daunen Embodied but it is a lonely, unhappy if privileged existence, secured in the castle tower. Purportedly of divine lineage, she ritualistically ingests a potion that renders her skin fatally poisonous to the touch of others. Her consequent role as royal executioner fuels the mystique of herself and the perception of the formidable divine status of the royal court.
When her elderly trusted guard dies, he is tactically replaced by a young man from a neighbouring kingdom. Leif falls for Twylla and, in him, she finds the companionship and affection she craves but the fatal touch keeps them apart. She is betrothed to the absent Prince Merek whom she has not met. It is when Merek returns with political ambition that the novel becomes involving and hard to put down. Leif is the outsider and brings an objective eye and forensic hand to the goings-on in the court, able to gradually reveal to Twylla the court as a hot-bed of conspiracy, scheming, treachery and malign sovereign ambition. All is not what it seems however, whichever way it is viewed. There is no facile predictable ending to the novel but, rather, the suggestion of more intriguing novels about Twylla who is ultimately living incognito in self-exile from the disgraced palace, her naivety gone, ready to make a new self-determined life.
A remarkably well-written novel: very engrossing, credibly plotted, enjoyably imaginable through its rich detail.
Reviewed by Kevin Steinberger
