The Chatelaine
By: Kate Heartfield
UK release: May 25, 2023. Buy links here.
Canada release: Aug. 8, 2023. Buy links here.
- Winner of the Aurora Award for Best Novel, 2019
- Shortlisted for the Crawford Award
- Starred Review from Publishers Weekly
- On the Locus Recommended List
- Locus Awards finalist
- Shortlisted for the Sunburst Award
A revised edition of the 2018 novel Armed in Her Fashion, originally published by ChiZine Publications. Contains new material. Content note here.
Reviews
In Armed in Her Fashion, Kate Heartfield paints a darkly fantastic, humourously grotesque portrait of the European Middle Ages. Heartfield’s deep knowledge of art and literature from and about the medieval period allows her to approach her setting in a way that is simultaneously affectionate and subversive. Her engaging characters wander through a landscape in which horror and absurdity combine, seemingly rigid truths are deconstructed, and it very much matters who is telling the story.
…These fantastic elements and more are skillfully woven into the political and religious machinations of the era, but this is the least of Heartfield’s achievements. The novel is written with arresting detail and challenges literary tropes about women. …
Publishers Weekly, starred review
Armed in Her Fashion is Kate Heartfield’s debut novel, and what a strange, compelling, genre-bending debut it is. Part horror, part fantasy, part history, and part epic, it combines all of its elements into a commentary on gender, power, and patriarchy. It centres around several women (and one man) who want in their own ways to have their due.
That makes it sound deeply serious. Actually, it’s enormously fun…
It’s exactly the sort of thing you don’t see a lot of in a genre that’s dominated by swordplay and explosive magic, and Heartfield constructs it in a way that’s never dry or slow… Armed in Her Fashion has a ton of originality while still hitting on the things you want out of a solid fantasy novel.
Dark, like 72 percent chocolate, but in a good way.
This book, steeped as it is in excellent world building and with lots of historical references, is unlike anything I’ve read. I couldn’t put it down. – Ivy