The Angel Makers by Jessica Gregson

Life can take unexpected twists and turns. One action can also cause a domino effect that will continue tumbling until one block hits a wall. For me, the previous two sentences tell me everything about this book. Well, maybe they don’t tell you about the passion, the hardship and the conflict within this book, but they do tell me a lot about how unexpected life can turn out.

Sari was seen as the strange cursed village girl. Being avoided was just part of her life, until the oldest son of the wealthiest family in the village becomes betrothed to her. Then the her fathers dies and people once again see her differently when she moves in with the village midwife (and a sort of hedge witch). Then the war happens and Sari’s life changes forever. The men have all left to fight and the women remain. Things get a little better and when the local manor house it taken over to be a prison camp, things change again. She finds love with a prisoner and so do some of the other women in the village who are freed from abusive or controlling husbands. 

When her betrothed returns, injured during the war, things change and Sari refuses to accept those changes. Instead she finds a way to rid herself of her betrothed and his newly abusive ways. And the domino events begin.

This book captivated me quickly and only occasionally did my interest wane; yet never did it die completely. Sari is an interesting character and the sequence of events in this book is both horrific and saddening. Ferenc, Sari’s betrothed, seems like a normal and good man for the time and it was heart-breaking almost to see the changes in him the war brought. Ferenc comes back from the war a broken man and while Sari tries to make things work between them even thought her heart lies more with the Italian prisoner, Marco.

Ferenc is plagued by the events during his time at war and has become an abusive man and even without Marco in the picture, Sari can not bare to spend the rest of her life as a battered woman. So she slowly kills him with arsenic. When other women in the village start understanding that is how he died and another abusive husband dies the same way, they comes to Sari wanting the same method to kill their abusive or war-torn husbands. Then they want it for more than just those reasons and in the end many people die because they are an inconvenience.

This book is a fictional interpretation of real events in Hungary during the early 1900’s. I wondered at first how come Sari and the other women were not caught sooner but then I realized it is a small village and probably wouldn’t have people skilled yet in identifying arsenic poisoning. The events in this book did take place around the same time the scientists were starting to figure out how to identify heavy metal poisoning. It was interesting.

I found The Angel Makers to be an interesting and captivating read. 4 Stars.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

If you’d like to find out more about the nonfiction side of The Angel Makers, I’d start with checking out Wikipedia.

I received this book from the Amazon Vine program.