I picked this one up because I thought the premise of the Devil interacting with a woman and all her descendants was an interesting way to frame an intergenerational family story.
While this is follows eight generations, it’s also more a story told in vignettes. It doesn’t necessarily wrap up one person’s story and then move on to the next. Instead each member of the family has a one chapter focused on them and within that chapter, the reader might get foreshadowing about another character’s story or a conclusion to someone else’s. Additionally while it is mostly linear, it does jump around a bit – for example, we get a chapter from someone’s daughter long before we ever get that character’s POV, and there are some things we find out rather late in the novel (I honestly had assumed I had missed something early on or that we would never get certain details and then we did).
The novel has a family tree in the beginning which I flipped back to rather regularly, and is divided into 4 books. At the beginning of these books, there were folklore-like stories of the devil which were some of my favorite parts of the novel. In fact, the use of the devil was rather subtle in this story, especially the further along in time we get, as people move away from traditional ways and into the modern age. I was actually a little disappointed we didn’t get more of the devil and in some cases, he felt more like a metaphor than a character.
Overall, I quite liked this one and thought it was a creative take on how to tell this kind of story but there were a few points where the pacing was a little off, or we didn’t get as much time with a specific character as I wanted. I also thought it was interesting how Fayne had some generation’s stories and failings repeat each other, with illegitimate sons and legitimate sons falling for the same women, and the push and pull of the religion across the generations from the witch woman to her preacher son to the rebellious son and more.
