pamela
I had to DNF this at about 15%, so I won't be reviewing this. It's not at all a bad book, and Maitland's prose is beautiful, but the meandering slow tone is just not something I'm in the right headspace for.
To put it into perspective: this is a single sentence that appears on page 2 of the novel!
"The frost on the roofs of the cottages glittered in the sunshine and thin spirals of lavender-grey smoke rose from dozens of hearth fires as women began to bake the noonday’s bread and sweep the dust from their floors, while their menfolk, rags wound about their hands, stirred vats of boiling tar or sawed planks for new boats, some standing in deep pits so that only the tops of their heads showed above the ground, blizzards of sawdust already covering their greasy coifs."
That isn't even the only example of those kinds of run-on sentences. It's a stylistic choice, but one that I definitely feel a reader needs to be in the right frame of mind for. I've no doubt this would be a rewarding read, but only for someone with the time and mental stillness to really commit to it.