Saga

 Saga

Reviewed By  Ian Banks       March 20, 2020

 

Author  Nikki McWatters

Distributor:      UQP
ISBN:                 9780702262517
Publisher:         UQP
Release Date:   November 2019  

Website:    https://www.uqp.com.au 

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The final in the Systir trilogy laced around  Astrid, Mercy and Mia, Saga rates up there for passion, fascination and emotion as the lives and times of three very different women from vastly differing times in history draws to a final time in today’s world, a world which is very different but very much the same.

1066: Astrid is in Norway – She is destined to become a high priestess at the last remaining temple. She realises the learning must be recorded for history and must be protected from the Roman Church and Norway’s kings. She records all of her learning and the last days of the old religion then hides the books, hoping they will eventually be found and kept safe.

Mercy is in Glasgow in 1813, an orphan girl who had a parcel of clothes and a book she had inherited when she first entered the Orphanage. She grows too old to remain there; she was sold off to an undertaker to follow the hearse. She eventually escapes to London where she meets Anne Ratcliffe, author of Gothic horrors novels and is coached into becoming a society lady. Mercy discovers she has only been a challenge to Mrs Ratcliffe, a Pygmalion situation, and decides to return to Glasgow to collect her parcel left behind at the Orphanage.

Mia lives in present day Australia. She is given a very old book at her cousin’s funeral which refers to another book somewhere in Scotland, possibly the Orkney’s. She decides to go to Scotland to find out what her ancestry is and connections to the book. But first she needs to track down a second book, which may hold many of the answers to so many of the questions she has about her cousin’s death and family history.

Based around the concept of the story lifting the emotion, and used as a vehicle to bring into the modern world so much of history and spirituality forgotten or seldom viewed, these three women who form a sisterhood down through the centuries have much to tell, to offer, as well as present for inspection and acceptance through the modern and yet ever changing scope of a generation seeking.

Non Fiction