City of Crows

July 23, 2018
Womersley (Bereft) makes the early history of French witchcraft the backbone of this ghoulishly pleasing novel set in 17th-century Provence. To save the life of her last remaining child, Charlotte Picot flees her small village of Saint-Gilles after the plague kills her husband and two daughters. Just after leaving, Charlotte is attacked by bandits who capture her son. She wakes alone in the woods with the help of an old woman who pulls her back to life and gives her sinister powers that allow her to summon demons. Meanwhile, Adam Lesage is freed from prison in possession of a map that shows the location of a hidden fortune in Paris, guarded by dark spirits. On his way, Lesage meets Charlotte, who believes that Lesage is a demon she summoned to help retrieve her son. Fascinated and frightened by Charlotte’s powers, Lesage agrees to help find her son in hopes that she too will help him find his fortune. Together, they travel to Paris—the City of Crows—and enter the dark, evil underworld of spirits and witches. Based on medieval popularity of witchcraft in France and the history of the plague, Womersley weaves a haunting tale of the drastic lengths people will go to achieve their deepest desires.

August 1, 2018

Charlotte Picot has known nothing of the world outside of her small village in 17th-century France, but when a bout of plague carries off her husband and leaves her with Nicolas, their one living son, she understands that they must escape the disease. Their journey to safety is disrupted when Nicolas is kidnapped on the road, leaving Charlotte to resort to witchcraft in an effort to find him. Her story is further complicated by the mysterious Lesage, a cunning magician with a complex history. Ultimately, Charlotte must make terrible choices and sacrifices in the name of her loved ones. Highlighting the experiences of the poor in times of crises past, Australian author Womersley (Bereft; The Low Road; Cairo) challenges audiences to suspend perceptions of reality and, at times, morality in favor of his storytelling. VERDICT Though at times a laborious and often bleak read, the narratives of two unlikely companions create an entertaining and intelligent work for historical fiction fans.--Rachel Sanders, Univ. of North Carolina Libs., Greensboro

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 15, 2018
Signs, wonders, and witchcraft beset 17th-century France in Australian author Womersley's (Cairo, 2014, etc.) fourth novel.This grim but spellbinding book is a danse macabre to the tune of Womersley's incantatory prose. The year is 1673. In the rural hamlet of Saint-Gilles, Charlotte Picot's husband dies of plague. Now she has only her son, Nicolas, her other three children having succumbed to various illnesses. Hoping to avoid contagion, mother and son flee their village. On the road, marauders ambush the pair: Nicolas is kidnapped. Charlotte, wounded and delirious, wanders in a Bruegel-ian dreamscape but is healed by Marie Rolland, a hermit witch. Marie passes her knowledge and her black book to Charlotte, instructing her to use them wisely, advice Charlotte almost immediately ignores. Thinking she is summoning a demon, she's actually crossed paths with a man named Adam Lesage, who, released after five years as a galley slave, is on his way back to Paris. In order to bend him to her will and enlist his aid in reaching Paris to look for Nicolas, she threatens to cast him back. She means to hell; Lesage thinks she means to the galleys. Almost immediately, the reader's credulity is challenged: Lesage (based on a known sorcerer later caught up in a plot against the Sun King) seems too jaded and sophisticated for such a misapprehension. Womersley's Paris is a tableau vivant of repellent sights and scents, overcrowding, nonexistent sanitation, and abject poverty. Lesage rejoins his Parisian accomplices: charlatans, magicians, and witches who profitably exploit the superstitions of the spoiled nobility. Desperate to escape his imagined bondage, he traces Nicolas' whereabouts to a den of child traffickers and agrees to ransom him--in return for his help in recovering a hidden treasure. Fascinating historical truths clash with swashbuckler tropes until Womersley's only way out is through improbable plot development and puzzling character behavior.Worth reading for the writing alone, but the close will confound and frustrate many readers; a sequel may be the only remedy.

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June 29, 2017
It’s quite a change of setting from 1980s Melbourne in Chris Womersley’s previous novel Cairo to the world of magic and witchcraft in 17th-century France in City of Crows. It’s a time when the claims of science and reason have not yet asserted themselves against popular beliefs and superstitions, a time of potions for ailments, poisons for foes, and fortune tellers to make a future wish come true. For Charlotte Picot, life’s injustices are piling up as she loses several of her offspring to fever, and then her husband. When her only surviving child is snatched by bandits, potentially for some perverse ritual, she is desperate for a remedy. A forest encounter with a kindly witch and a compact with a Parisian ne’er-do-well and notorious assistant at black masses gives her hope that she can track her son down. Based on real-life personages associated with the ‘Affair of the Poisons’ during Louis XIV’s reign, Womersley’s immersive tale is written with great felicity and reflects prodigious research. I liked the little contemporaneous nods too, for instance, to the connections (already then) between the church and paedophilia, or the construct of the witch in a patriarchal culture (‘what they call a witch is really a woman with power,’ a character remarks). At times it’s a little laboured in the telling, but overall this is a well-realised, entertaining historical fiction. Martin Shaw works as a translator and literary agent in Leipzig, Germany. He remains a bookseller at heart