As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann
565 pages
Published 2001
Read from June 4 to June 9
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
I can't remember the last book I read that could be described as a love story -- a book which, if I were asked to summarize it in one sentence, I would say "It's about the romantic or sexual relationship between these two characters." As Meat Loves Salt explores a detailed and well-researched depiction of Civil War England, full of class conflict, pamphleteering, utopian projects, land enclosures, and hardline religion, but the main thrust (heh) of the story is undoubtedly the unstable, abusive, yet movingly depicted love between the violent, jealous, seemingly schizotypal narrator and a sensitive pamphleteer and utopianist. I'm generally not a fan of characters who hear voices in their heads -- it's a lazy crutch or cliche represented far more often in novels, seemingly, than in the real life population -- and the structural supports of the plot can get rickety at times, relying on highly unlikely coincidental meetings not once but twice. But the emotional meat (heh) of the story is rich, at turns swooning and heartbreaking, and McCann artfully elicits a startling amount of sympathy for her narrator. I'd love to find more historical romances as emotionally true and historically meticulous as this.
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