A review by tessisreading2
The Owl Killers by Karen Maitland

3.0

The constant perspective flips were very difficult in the beginning - it took a while to figure out who all these people were in relation to one another. The narrative voices did sound pretty similar, and the constant jumping around made it difficult to get particularly attached to any one of them. I'm guessing the goal was to make sure that there were very few one-dimensional villains, but it didn't really work. There were several one-dimensional villains (not viewpoint characters) and it became clear over the course of the book which viewpoint characters were "good" and which were "bad" (or crazy, or desperate, or just corruptible). The conclusion of the book didn't really do much for me. It felt rushed and confused/confusing.

Anyway, I know it was the middle ages and it was a particularly awful period of the middle ages, but this book was just intensely depressing. Everyone was mean and miserable and cruel to one another. There was no one I was really rooting for, frankly.