Lapvona by Otessa Mosfegh

Format: 320 pages, Paperback

Published: June 21, 2022 by Penguin USA

Historical fiction /library

How on earth did I forget to review this book? Hell, even forget to put it on goodreads?! I did put it on insta, but here nope. And this truly is a book that should have been reviewed 1 month ago.

This book was all kinds of fucked up and to even explain it. Like wtf? Horror, historical fiction, and just disgusting. But also really well written. And I can not do it justice trying to write a review this much later.

There is really dark stuff like cannibalism, rape, torture, , and in all of this one boy is doing his best to survive the dark middle ages.

And most people in this book suck too. But why is it good? Hell I know. it just was just...yes like watching a morbid train wreck that you can't take your eyes off.

Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life’s few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him as a baby, as she did so many of the village’s children. Ina’s gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina’s home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place.

Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, civility and savagery, will prove to be very thin indeed.