Sin Eater

January 6, 2020
Playwright Campisi draws on a punitive English folk ritual in her rousing, impressive debut, a bleak reimagining of palace intrigue in 16th-century England. Convicted for vagrancy, 14-year-old May Owens is condemned to be a sin eater, a woman meant to absorb the sins of the dying by hearing deathbed confessions and consuming symbolic foods (“Bearing a Bastard—Grapes”). After a fellow sin eater refuses to eat a deer heart placed on the coffin of Corlis Ashton, governess to young Queen Bethany (a stand-in for Elizabeth I), the Queen’s secretary, Black Fingers, sentences the sin eater to death. Black Fingers then forces May to eat the heart, but she never hears Corlis’s confession or learns which sin the heart represents—though she senses uncomfortably that the heart signifies murder. As May becomes convinced that Corlis was not guilty, she risks questioning Black Fingers’s judgment and he stabs her, a wound from which she barely recovers. Undaunted, May seeks help from fellow outcasts Bridey, who is a leper, and Paul to untangle a complicated court conspiracy. Campisi’s stirring portrait of injustice is deepened by May’s cleverness, frustration, and grief. This spellbinding novel is a treat for fans of feminist speculative fiction.

February 1, 2020
A teenage girl defies the society that would make her an outcast in Campisi's semihistorical, semidystopian debut novel. When 14-year-old May is caught stealing, the punishment dictated by the court is a grim mercy indeed: Instead of being hanged, she will instead become a sin eater, expected to move silently through the world, neither speaking nor being spoken to, and performing funeral rites that will allow the dead to leave behind their earthly sins as they move into the afterlife. Sin eaters hear a dying person's last confession and then consume food in honor of the dead; each food symbolizes a particular sin, from disobedience to lust to betrayal. As they consume the food, sin eaters take each sin onto their own souls. When May attends the Eating for one of the queen's ladies, she is disturbed to see a deer's heart included in the spread, for animal hearts symbolize murder--and the deer's heart, the murder of a child. May's mentor refuses to consume the deer's heart, as it wasn't part of the original recitation of sins, and she is taken away and tortured to death. May becomes determined to get to the bottom of the mystery--what sin is in danger of being exposed, and who would kill to protect this secret? While the tradition of the sin eater is based on historical fact and the setting is clearly supposed to be inspired by Elizabethan England, Campisi deliberately creates an alternate world where Queen Bethany, daughter of King Harold II and the disgraced Alys Bollings, has taken the throne after the death of her half sister, Queen Maris, in the midst of a religious civil war. While her decision to build this world, a thinly veiled version of true English history, is a curious one, it does add an element of fantasy to the novel that's very much reminiscent of The Handmaid's Tale. In this way, it transcends its historical roots to give us a modern heroine. Richly imaginative and strikingly contemporary.

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February 15, 2020
Basing her setting closely on Elizabethan England, Campisi shapes a tale of folk customs, dark superstitions, and feminine power through the life of a young outcast who uncovers evidence of terrible injustice. Jailed for stealing bread, 14-year-old May Owens is made to become a sin eater, hearing deathbed confessions and consuming ritual foods representing the person's recited sins, thus taking them on herself. Wearing a locked brass collar marking her macabre profession, she finds herself shunned and forced into silence, aside from her appointed role. When she spies a deer heart atop the coffin of the royal governess, Corliss Ashton, May realizes someone wants to blame Corliss for a transgression she hadn't confessed to. May's illiteracy and social isolation complicate her dangerous quest to unearth answers. Her spunky humor and determination to assert her own value, even in a dead-end occupation at society's nadir, make her a captivating heroine. Recommend this debut, an original melding of mystery and alternate history, to admirers of Karen Maitland's folklore-infused medieval thrillers and Diane Setterfield's Once Upon a River.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)