The Soul Thief, by Cecelia Holland - Corban Loosestrife Series

The Soul Thief

Cecelia Holland

Corban Loosestrife Series

This novel starts out right for my tastes. It’s the mid-tenth century and Corban’s family live in Ireland. ‘Nuff said. Better yet, they are not royal or noble , they interact with Danes, they go to Jorvik/York, and the female characters are not Barbie dolls. Sigh. A perfect novel.

I can’t say that I was disappointed by the rest of the book either. The characters are appealing, the stories archetypal but not simplistic, the magic which I normally do not care for in historical fiction is handled in a natural, earthy way, and the settings are detailed and, with one glaring exception, sound pretty authentic. The glaring exception is the trade in casks of whiskey… um, no. That potable was not developed for about 300 years. It caused me to say “Whiskey?! What?! Aloud and wake up my husband sleeping in our bed next to me.

Corban, a directionless and uncommitted young fellow, is ordered out of their farmstead in Ireland by his father. His sister, Maeve, convinces him to let her talk to old Da and to come back in the morning to see if he relented. When he comes back he finds his family dead and the farmstead in flames. The responsible Vikings had also kidnapped Maeve. The story follows both Corban as he searches for her and her herself as she struggles to survive and to resist the title “soul thief”, a sort of Maiden-Mother-Crone sorceress who, for unrevealed reasons, is helping a man named Bluetooth disrupt the lineage of the various Scandinavian kingdoms, including Jorvik.

While Maeve, who has otherworldly sight, lies mad and fighting unseen forces in Denmark, Corban gets distracted first in Jorvik where he meets a family of three girls living destitute in an already depressed economy thanks to the ill-conceived ideas of their king, Erik Bloodaxe (a historical character whose biography I posted on Random Biographies today.) On his renewed expedition to find her, his ship is blown across the ocean to North America, which promises to be the setting of a later volume. When he does find her the sorceress bargains with him: “Get Erik to fight for the crown of Norway and you can have your sister back.” He goes back to Jorvik and blows his assignment when he sees that the world might be better off without Bloodaxe in it at all.

It’s a ripping yarn but subtle as well. Corban seems to need a psychic lodestone to keep on track, but if it’s there, he can’t quite see it. He is a hero outside the usual mold, not an antihero by any means, but something of a well meaning trickster hero.. entirely without malevolent intentions but nevertheless full of tricks. I actually did not like the character that much, as a person, but I think he is a brilliant character that challenges one’s notions of what the questing hero should be.

I am looking forward to the rest of the series.

The National Library Service for the Blind had sent me the next novel in the series, The Witches’ Kitchen, so I asked to get its prequel first. I wound up downloading it from their BARD site and listened to it on my beloved digital talking book machine.