Anna North (Outlawed) crafts a narrative of contemporary climate change and ancient druidic history in Bog Queen. This wise and compelling novel grounds the human experience in the long arc of time and poses questions of preservation and legacy through the stories of two women who lived centuries apart and the moss that connects them.
When a woman's body is dug up in a bog in Ludlow, in northwest England, the medical examiner calls on Agnes, a forensic anthropologist. Agnes has "this gift, everyone said it, an instinct for the body and its forms," and her instinct tells her the woman is centuries old, held in the bog "safe under the surface, in [a] bath of earth, for many times her lifespan." As Agnes works to discover who the woman was, she is caught up in conflicting forces surrounding the Ludlow bog: climate activists determined to reflood the bog, companies set on extracting as much peat as possible from it, and developers determined to build new housing atop it.
North moves between Agnes's timeline and the life of the bog queen, a young druid in early Roman Britain. The two women live different lives, in different eras, yet both strive to expand their worlds and move beyond the expectations placed on them by men. Interludes from the bog itself, a living organism and ecosystem, provide the knowledge and perspective of millennia. With layers as dense and interconnected as the bog moss itself, The Bog Queen pays tribute to the persistent forces of nature, the stories humans tell, the stories they live, and the legacies they leave behind. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer