Canticle by Janet Rich Edwards Review (⭐ 1.5/5) — Beautifully Researched... But I Was Counting the Pages 😴
There are books you race through because you can't wait to see what happens.
Then there are books where you look at the page count every ten minutes wondering if your Kindle is malfunctioning.
Sadly... Canticle was the second kind for me.
📚 Quick Stats
Rating: ⭐ 1.5/5
Author: Janet Rich Edwards
Genre: Historical Fiction / Medieval Fiction / Religious Fiction
⚠️ Trigger Warnings
This novel contains:
Child death
Pregnancy and childbirth complications
Graphic violence
Sexual assault
Physical abuse
Child abuse
Religious persecution
Self-harm
Starvation
Illness
Miscarriage/pregnancy loss
Depression
Religious extremism
Execution by burning
Gender discrimination
🚨 Spoiler Warning
⚠️ This review contains FULL spoilers, including the ending. If you haven't read Canticle yet, now is your chance to escape before I accidentally spoil medieval Flanders for you.
📖 Plot Summary (Full Spoilers)
Canticle is set in late-13th-century Flanders, where religion governs nearly every aspect of life.
The novel actually opens at the end.
Right from page one, we're told that Aleys is walking toward the stake where she is about to be burned alive for heresy, while the crowd strangely chants "Saint!" in her honor. Personally, I wasn't sure this worked. I'm okay with stories revealing the ending first when they're teasing something mysterious (like The Teacher by Freida McFadden does so well), but here we're immediately told the major destination. The question becomes how she gets there rather than what happens, and for me that removed a lot of the suspense.
The story then jumps back several years.
Aleys grows up in Damme as the daughter of a wool merchant. After her beloved mother dies in childbirth, Aleys throws herself into religion, believing she somehow failed to save her mother through prayer. She teaches herself Latin, secretly studies scripture with a boy named Finn, and eventually falls in love with him. But when Finn decides to enter a monastery, Aleys concludes that she, too, is meant to dedicate her life to God.
When her father arranges a marriage she doesn't want, Aleys flees and joins a begijnhof, a community of Beguines—religious women who live devout lives without becoming nuns. At first she looks down on them for not being "holy enough," but she slowly comes to appreciate both their independence and their commitment to helping others.
While working in the hospital, Aleys unexpectedly begins performing what appear to be miraculous healings. Word spreads quickly, drawing crowds, Church officials, and political attention. The miracles are inconsistent, however, and when Aleys cannot save the beloved Grand Mistress Sophia, tensions within the community explode.
The Church decides the best solution is to make Aleys an anchoress—essentially sealing her inside a tiny stone cell attached to a cathedral where she'll spend the rest of her life praying.
And this...
...is where the book completely lost me.
For the final third of the novel, Aleys spends almost all of her time confined to this tiny room. Her days become an endless cycle of prayers, visions, visitors, and routine. She teaches the servant girl Marte to read and write, experiences increasingly abstract mystical visions, and slowly watches the politics outside her window unfold.
Meanwhile, Friar Lukas becomes increasingly obsessed with Aleys. Eventually he enters her cell and attempts to sexually assault her, believing their union has some divine purpose. Aleys fights back, stabs him, and escapes.
She returns to the Beguines, but the Church charges her with heresy, using both her mystical writings and Marte's feminist reinterpretation of the story of Lot's wife as evidence against them.
During her trial, Aleys refuses to condemn her friends. When given one final opportunity to recant, she chooses instead to protect the Beguines, even after Finn—now a monk—arrives with a horse and a chance to escape.
She walks willingly toward execution.
The novel ends where it began: Aleys approaches the stake while crowds proclaim her a saint. As the fire is lit, the narration becomes intentionally mystical. Some witnesses believe she burns. Others seem to witness her consumed by divine light instead. No body or remains are ever found, leaving it deliberately ambiguous whether she physically died or experienced some miraculous ascension.
In the aftermath, Bishop Jan punishes Lukas by imprisoning him in the very anchorhold where Aleys once lived, forcing him to spend the rest of his life praying to the woman he helped condemn. The epilogue shows Marte continuing to write while caring for an elderly blind Beguine, suggesting Aleys's legacy survives through the women she inspired.
💭 My Thoughts
This book and I simply were not on the same wavelength.
I completely understand why some readers are going to love this. It's meticulously researched, deeply theological, and clearly written by someone who knows medieval religious history inside and out.
Unfortunately...
I was bored.
Like... checking-how-many-pages-I-had-left every chapter bored. 😅
The pacing is incredibly slow. Not "quiet literary novel" slow.
More like tectonic plates politely passing each other slow.
Even if it had moved faster, though, I'm not convinced it would've changed my opinion very much because I never really connected with the story or the characters.
I actually didn't mind the sections in the begijnhof all that much. There were moments where the community dynamics became interesting, and I liked seeing women finding ways to educate themselves and support one another despite the restrictions placed on them.
But once Aleys became an anchoress, the novel became a real struggle for me.
There's something about books where the main character is physically confined and spends hundreds of pages doing...well...very little...that almost never works for me. I know this was historically accurate, and I appreciate that. I just don't think historical accuracy automatically makes for engaging fiction.
Most of those chapters consist of mystical visions that I often found difficult to follow, daily routines of prayer, long stretches of introspection, and Aleys wrestling with her faith. If that sounds fascinating to you, you may have a very different experience than I did.
👥 The Characters
Ironically, Aleys wasn't even my least favorite character.
That honor goes to Friar Lukas, whose descent into jealousy and self-righteous obsession made him increasingly unpleasant every time he appeared.
The Bishop wasn't much better.
The character I found myself wishing had more page time was actually Marte, the servant girl. Her story, her growth, and especially her desire to write felt far more compelling to me than many of the theological debates happening elsewhere. Every time the story shifted to her, I perked up a little...and then we'd go right back to another long sequence of visions.
🤔 The Ending
I also wasn't especially satisfied with the ending.
The novel spends hundreds of pages building toward Aleys's execution, yet when we finally get there, it deliberately refuses to tell us exactly what happened.
Did she burn?
Did she survive?
Did she ascend?
The novel intentionally leaves all of that open to interpretation.
Some readers will probably find that beautifully symbolic.
Personally, after investing that much time, I wanted a little more closure.
⭐ Final Verdict
I always try to separate "this wasn't for me" from "this is objectively bad."
This definitely falls into the first category.
I can absolutely see readers who enjoy literary historical fiction, medieval spirituality, and deeply philosophical explorations of faith loving this novel.
But I can also see a lot of readers putting it down halfway through.
For me, the pacing was simply too slow, the mystical visions too abstract, and the emotional connection just never happened.
Sometimes a book and a reader just aren't a match.
Unfortunately... this was one of those times.
⭐ Rating: 1.5/5
📚 If You Enjoyed (or Wanted Something Different)
If you're looking for historical fiction with stronger pacing or more engaging characters, I'd recommend:
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Matrix by Lauren Groff
The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett
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