Megan Campisi's Sin Eater opens with a 14-year-old girl named May being arrested for stealing a loaf of bread, in an alternate version of Elizabethan England. The royal family of Angland is entangled in court intrigue and murders, including of babes, to secure favored heirs to the throne, even considering marriage to the hated Northern lords. Common people work hard for a meager living; some starve unless given permission from the queen to beg in the street. The penalties for petty crimes are high: vagrants have a hole "burned through the gristle of [the] ear with a hot iron as thick as a man's thumb." The penalty for a second offense is death.
In this cruel world, below even dung men and woad dyers in the social order, lies a cursed role: that of the Sin Eater. "It's always women who eat sins, since it was Eve who first ate a sin: the Forbidden Fruit." She is called to deathbeds to hear the Recitation, a confession of sins; she translates these sins into foods, which the family will prepare for the Eating. By taking the sins of others into herself, the Sin Eater absolves the deceased.
Sin Eater is a fully fleshed work of speculative fiction, abundant with the fine details of Elizabethan life and, of course, food. May is a damaged and sympathetic heroine, at once intelligent and innocent. This is an opulently imagined debut, horrific and weirdly beautiful, filled with earnest feeling as well as cruelty. Set aside time to read this engrossing novel in one go. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia