Great Power Summoned - Reviewing Kate Heartfield's "The Embroidered Book"

Women find their power where they can, and remember it in twisted threads. Misheard whispers. Embroidered and disguised.

This was a pretty wild read, people, and I don’t know how to begin reviewing... I guess it's best to start with the author and her previous work.

I have discovered the writer Kate Heartfield about three or four years ago while I was reviewing her “Alice Payne” series for the Otherland Bookstore; three novellas which revolve around Alice Payne, a time-traveling highway robber, her lover and inventor Jane Hodgson and Prudence Zuniga, an agent of the Teleosophic Core Command, or TCC, which tries to alter major historical events. The series was a charming mix of historical novel and SFF, a light and nice read with interesting notions for history fans.

What made me a real fan was another book, though. I think it was about the same time that I read Armed in Her Fashion for the first time; a book about a handful of war widows who pair up with a transgender soldier to raid hell in war-torn medieval Europe, based on the Flemish folkloric tale “Dulle Griet” and the corresponding painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It is a huge shame that this gem of a book has been out of print since about 2019 and hasn’t been re-issued yet! Apart from being one of the best stories I have read, this book is especially dear to me because it was the last book that was discussed in the Otherland Speculative Fiction Book Club in person before the pandemic broke out, in March 2020. Ah, those good olden days… That evening was legendary because apart from marking our last gathering in person, it was filled with a kind of joy, some people might associate with Christmas or Halloween, or whatever else makes them feel excessively happy, because we had received a present package from Kate to our book club! You see, the book was quasi undeliverable due to publisher (ChiZine, need I say more?) issues but Heartfield heard about our meeting and sent us a big box full with the very last copies of Armed in Her Fashion that exist on this Earth. She just gifted them to us! You can read the full story, documented with photos, right here.

Coming back too her work, what intrigues me in Heartfield’s books above all is how she captures the essence of the woman condition and dovetails it with historical settings as well as cool supernatural elements. So, I was naturally excited when she reached out for the reviewing of her newest, The Embroidered Book, which will be released next month.

The Embroidered Book follows no one less than the infamous last Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, and her older sister Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples and Sicily. Starting with their childhood as the youngest girls of the spectacular House of Habsburg-Lorraine, to their planned marriages to various heirs apparent of the European royalty, the book finishes at the famed bitter end of Antoinette’s life. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Heartfield without the preternatural; the two girls have been raised by a governess who taught them magic and who, after her death, left them a collection of spells and tricks, called by the little siblings the embroidered book. In short, the premise is, “What if two of the most powerful women in European history were, in reality, witches and everything we know as history is the direct or indirect consequence of a spell used in place or a spell gone wrong?” 

Nothing is free in this utterly coherent magic system, though - it is sacrifices for memorization; you need to sacrifice a memory to remember a spell and therefore need to carefully choose what you can do without. Tricky, right?

There are two more central aspects to The Embroidered Book that make it a ravishing read. First of them is Heartfield’s ability to write about characters who seriously felt like family to me. Admittedly, when you spend a lot of time with fictional characters and you do that here – we're talking about a toe crusher of more than 600 pages – you get attached to them and the closer Marie Antoinette’s inevitable end got, the more nervous I got and was ultimately a little heartbroken, I admit. I think it’s the author’s knack to present the thoughts, feelings, inner workings of these women so consummately that you understand them and, very important in fiction, are interested in what happens to them, even if you don’t like them, which I did. Of course, you can see in France’s last queen a decadent, spoiled, depraved, horrible woman; but she was also the woman who exactly fit in the French royal system and did everything the court life asked of her, to a fault. Of course, you can see in the Neapolitan queen a dutiful, smart, cunning woman; but she was also the woman who was forced to marry someone who belittled and humiliated her in public and in private, someone she couldn’t stand, but had to sleep with anyway, duty to her people and all. So imposing were the characters that I personally needed some time to recover after having finished!

And finally, there is the notion of power, which, of course, is and should be central when talking about magic. In Antoine's and Charlotte's handling magic, we see two different ways in which great power can be dealt with and to what consequences both approaches can lead. While Charlotte decides to join a secret brotherhood, a magisters’ guild, that advocates conscious and responsible usage of magic by a select few, Antoine creates her own little group around her which ultimately aims at distributing this knowledge to everyone. But there is no raised finger, no definite right or wrong here, as that line is very blurred and there's treason and intrigues galore in both fronts. It’s more like the author plays with this metaphor, throws it into this fervent slice of history and makes it at home there, and I LOVED it!

So, fans of magic, magic systems, feminist fantasy, Marie-Antoinette and the French Revolution: don’t forget to grab The Embroidered Book (publication date: February 17), it’s a gripping, wonderful escape. The cover is beautiful too, look how the embroidery shines on the picture...

My thanks to the author for sending me a reviewer's copy, I really enjoyed it.