Black Wine

by Candas Jane Dorsey

Why is there an old woman, in a hanging cage for punishment, keeping a journal written in blood? Candas Jane Dorsey has written an ambitious, feminist novel about women coming to terms with their identity in a barbarous fantasy world. Dorsey's women travel across the world, from the slave dens to the merchant cities, across seas by ship and by dirigible, to isolated mountain villages and back again. "But there remains provocative ambiguity as the story progresses. There is a woman exiled from her family, a mother who has abandoned her daughter, an old woman in a cage, a young women slave on a lord's estate who does not remember her past. How many of them are the same woman?

• ISBN10: 192740035X
• ISBN13: 9781927400357
• Publish Date: 1 October 2013 (first published 1 January 1997)
• Publish Status: Unknown
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Five Rivers Chapmanry
• Edition: 2nd edition
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 306
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

Must mull this one over. I didn’t connect with it the way I hoped; I really liked it in theory, but in practice it felt… unpolished? Evasive? I underlined plenty, though, so it will be interesting to see if it’s one of those seeds that burrows itself in my mind to bloom later.