Siavahda's Reviews > A Sweet Sting of Salt

4.5 stars happily rounded up.

Rtc!

HIGHLIGHTS
~midwives get RESPECT
~know! your!! myths!!!
~not all men sure but DEFINITELY this one
~the MC is Too Logical
~sapphic selkies ftw

A Sweet Sting of Salt is what I think is called low fantasy – there’s not a lot of magic at all, and what there is doesn’t try to explain itself. But it’s also a fantasy in the sense of, this is almost a historical fiction novel, but it’s one where queer characters get their happy endings without too much homophobia; where women escape and make lives for themselves outside of the patriarchy, again without nearly as much trouble as people of the time period probably would have experienced. It’s fantasy in the same way a daydream is fantasy, in that one aspect, and I really appreciated it.

There’s enough queerphobia in the real world, I don’t want to read about it in my fiction, okay?

But though it’s low-magic, don’t think this is a low-stakes, low-tension novel, because it most certainly is not. Anxiety for the characters had my guts in knots for a good half of the book, and there’s real, and really awful, violence, with the threat of worse hanging over the heads of the MC and her love interest.

It’s not a chill time, is what I’m saying here. A Sweet Sting of Salt is, well, sweet, but it’s also heart-in-your-throat nerve-wracking when it’s not giving you heart-ache – or both at once! Don’t curl up with this one expecting a calm cosy read, because that is NOT what you’re going to get!

Jean was outed by the spiteful mother of the girl she loved years ago, but earned back the respect of her neighbours by becoming a very skilled midwife. (This is not a coincidence; Jean’s amazing mentor, the half-Indigenous Anneke, deliberately set Jean to learning midwifery because few people are so bigoted they’re willing to ostracize the person their lives, or those of their female relatives, will almost certainly depend on someday.) And as the blurb says, the story gets moving when a heavily pregnant woman Jean didn’t even know about (what kind of pregnant person wouldn’t make sure the local midwife knew about their condition?) appears on her land late at night, only to go ahead and have the fastest and easiest delivery Jean has ever seen.

The mysterious woman is Muirin, who barely speaks a word of English – and yet, Jean is able to pick up on something between Muirin and her husband, Tobias, that makes her insist Muirin and the newborn stay with her for a while ‘just to make sure all’s well’.

I despise the lack-of-communication trope, where things could be cleared up so easily if characters just talked to each other clearly and honestly – but in Sweet Sting of Salt, the issue is that Muirin legitimately can’t communicate, as she knows very little English. And although the reader knows – or at least strongly suspects! – that Muirin is a selkie, and that’s probably why she’s so (charmingly) odd and doesn’t speak English, Jean reaches very logical conclusions to her own questions about Muirin’s nature and origins. A whole lot of assumptions are made, but they’re well-reasoned given what Jean knows of the world. This isn’t one of those stories where the supernatural is staring the MC in the face the entire time and they almost wilfully refuse to see it; although I was frantic for Jean to figure things out and get to helping Muirin, I could absolutely follow her reasoning when she came up with explanations for Muirin’s lack of family, her ignorance of the local culture, and even her strained relationship with Tobias. It was – kind of amusingly frustrating, that Jean was so rational? That there were so many perfectly obvious, perfectly reasonable explanations for all of Jean’s questions? There was just no way for someone in Jean’s position – in life, in history, in geography, even in the patriarchy – to put it together that Muirin isn’t a foreigner in a bad position, but an honest-to-gods selkie.

Part of that – and this is really my only critique of the book – is that selkies never come up in Jean’s thoughts or any other part of her life. I was really surprised that Sutherland never took the time to let the reader know what a selkie actually is – especially given that there was one scene in particular, when a child is asking for water-legend stories, that would have been the perfect moment to introduce the concept and make sure the reader knew the myth of the selkie. If you don’t already know what a selkie is when you go into this book, there’s a good chance you’ll be pretty confused when the reveal does come, as the book is written as if it’s taken for granted that every reader knows about selkies.

I mean, I do? But I’m a myth-nerd born in Ireland, where selkie stories are traditional. I’m not sure how or why Sutherland – or her editor – expects most readers to know what she’s on about. Selkies are not a type of magical creature that show up a lot in fantasy fiction; everyone knows what a dragon is (debates about how many limbs they should have aside) but selkies? Joane Harris’ The Blue Salt Road is the only selkie book I can think of from a reasonably-big-name author, and I don’t think it made enough of a splash (hah!) to put selkies on the map, as it were.

But as I said, this is a very low-magic historical fantasy, where the selkie reveal is a comparatively minor plot-point near the end of the book. Infinitely more important is the relationship that develops between Jean and Muirin, how trust becomes friendship becomes another kind of love; and there are definitely feminist themes, as the blurb promises, but Sweet Sting of Salt never feels like an IssuesTM book – I never felt like I was being preached at, or that Sutherland was stating the obvious and rubbing my face in it, as other heavier-handed storytellers have done.

I think it helps that the focus of the book is so intimate; it’s not an IssuesTM story because it is Jean-and-Muirin’s story. And a big part of that story is the legal powerlessness of women in this time period; is the specific danger most women and femmes face from most cis men, ie the threat of someone who is bigger and stronger than you; is the slowly growing horror of just how awful Muirin’s situation is – one that she is only in because of supernatural means, but that plenty of human women have experienced through history, and still do today. But I appreciated that these were all treated less as themes and more like real, practical problems faced by the characters, if that makes any kind of sense. It’s not about lessons for the reader, it’s about the stumbling blocks and hindrances and outright dangers the characters have to overcome to get their happy ending.

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