Snag Your Copy The Hangmans Daughter (The Hangmans Daughter, #1) Formulated By Oliver Pötzsch Conveyed In EText
story takes place in Bavaria in, It is not really that much about the hangman's daughter, than it is about the hangman and the young physician in the town, There is a lot about torture and death that is a little uncomfortable to read about, But overall it was gripping and had compelling characters, Magdalena, the clever and headstrong daughter of Bavarian hangman Jakob Kuisl, lives with her father outside the village walls and is destined to be married off to another hangmans sonexcept that the town physicians son is hopelessly in love with her.
And her fathers wisdom and empathy are as unusual as his despised profession, It is, the Thirty Years War has finally ended, and there hasnt been a witchcraft mania in decades, But now, a drowning and gruesomely injured boy, tattooed with the mark of a witch, is pulled from a river and the villagers suspect the local midwife, Martha Stechlin.
Jakob Kuisl is charged with extracting a confession from her and torturing her until he gets one, Convinced she is innocent, he, Magdalena, and her wouldbe suitor race against the clock to find the true killer, Approaching Walpurgisnacht, when witches are believed to dance in the forest and mate with the devil, another tattooed orphan is found dead and the town becomes frenzied.
More than one person has spotted what looks like the devila man with a hand made only of bones, The hangman, his daughter, and the doctors son face a terrifying and very real enemy,
Page Numbers Source ISBN:X Updated,
read Having a difficult time with this one, That's what I get for jumping on the popularity bandwagon, So far, the titular character has been on one page, ONE! WTF translators!! Was this the original title And it just feels a bit anachronistic, nothing so far I can really put a finger on, but I'm wondering if this is "new novelist" or "uninspired translation," or just plain sophomoric writing
Meh.
It'll get better, right I hope, . . Last time I succumbed to "everybody's reading it," I got shafted with sitelinkThe Historian, Please, Book Gnomes, don't let this be another one of those, . .
finished! That wasn't so bad! I still can't figure out why it was called The Hangman's Daughter, since she really played a tertiary role in the storyline.
Heck, even the Leper House got more face time than the daughter, Mary Sue, err, . . I mean, Magdalena.
It's not so much that this was poorly written, because it wasn't, Sentences flowed well, dialogue made sense, people did things, It just felt uninspired. There was so much rich history to work with here, and yet, the history turned out to be such a bit player, just a background to the incessant “she's a witch! Let's burn her!” “No, we have to torture a confession out of her first!” vs.
“pssst, I know you're not a witch, so imma torture you just a little bit, to buy some time, We still friends”
There's also the basic plot device of a shadowy unidentified villain, who is behind the crime spree that has been pinned on the suspect witch.
Even though we get to see the character as part of the story, there's little hint of his motivation,
Not surprisingly, this novel has been something of a runaway bestseller, I suppose I shouldn't be perplexed, because it's one of those reads where you don't really have to strain your mind, or even remember anything, It's not quite book club pablum, because there is a story here, but all punches have been pulled, and the story has been watered down to “crowd pleaser.
”
You beer enthusiasts know exactly what I mean, Think of your FAVORITE brewpub, with the most unusual beers hoppy, malty, maybe a touch of anise, maybe it's organic, perhaps an imperial and what is the pub's bestseller “Amber.
” Or Coors Lite.
Why is Lipton Tea the most popular tea in American There are so many wonderful, amazing teas, and it's nearly the exact same preparation method, except instead of “sweepings and fannings,”the teeny tiny dusty bits they sweep off the tables into teabags, you get actual leaf.
No comparison.
Sheeple.
Frustration. I can't even load this into my “so bad it pissed me off”category, because it wasn't so bad, It DID piss me off, because it could have been SO MUCH BETTER,
But of course, if this book had lived up to its potential, it probably never would have seen publication, There's cynicism for you. People want pablum. The vast majority of bestsellers are powdered milk, Coors Lite, Lipton stories that couldhavebeen,
I did learn a lot about Leprosy, well, not from this book, but because I was skeptical that leprosy had played such a large role in medieval Europe.
Interestingly, I discovered that it was indeed epidemic around theth through theth centuries, and was probably spread as a result of soldiers returning from the Crusades.
It's estimated that there were as many as,leper houses spread throughout Europe by the lateth century thank you public library librarian,
Unfortunately for the historicity of this novel, which suggests that every city has its own leper house, the events are occurring in the midth century, by which time leprosy was mostly a nonstarter, with only a few isolated cases/isolated sanatoriums which housed the relatively few sufferers.
Wikipedia tells me that Norway had an epidemic in the earlyth century, notable for it's exception,
All of this creates a time problem, For the leprosy to be periodcorrect, the story would have to be staged overyears earlier, But witch burning in Europe reached a peak in the midth century, which makes it timecorrect for the setting of this novel, One or the other critical story element has to be anachronistic if the author is determined to keep both elements, These issues did not exist in equal import simultaneously in Europe,
Witch hunts are an incredible and unbelievable viewing scope into religious intolerance, hysteria, misconception and suspicion, Here again, we get barely the framework of a story, Here again, we have something that could have been so much more, And here again, we have something that, had it been so much more, might not have been marketable,
Which is why, ultimately, the story frustrated me, I learned some fascinating things because of questions sparked by the novel, but I didn't learn them from the novel, I don't expect stories I read to become textbooks in fact, I don't want them to be, But historical novels can be so much more than simply mindless entertainment, They can give us a backward look at where we came from, and insight into our modern trajectory,
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, ” George Santayana
The Hangmans Daughter
A book I read by accident
This is because I clicked the right button but in the wrong browser tab and I accidentally bought the Kindle edition of this book when I really wanted was another book by the same author, sitelinkDer Spielmann, depicting the life of the historical Johann Georg Faustus.
But never mind. The wrong decision turned out to be the right one after all,
April. A boy is found dead on the banks of the river Lech near the town of Schongau in Bavaria, Obviously the child was murdered, Tattooed on the boys shoulder the good townsfolk find a strange looking symbol which stirs up dark memories, Is it possible that a witch dwells among them Again Who you gonna call Robert Langdon wont be available for at least anotheryears and the “Büttel” the policemen, court officials, or whatever you like to call them are either dumb, drunk, or sleeping on the job.
The best man capable of investigating a crime like this would be the local hangman, Jakob Kuisl, Hes smart, experienced, and strongminded, And above all, he is not superstitious, Unfortunately, he is also something of a pariah, Although tolerated and needed, people rather make the sign of the cross than wishing him a good morning when they see him on the street, For the city leaders, the case is clear from the outset anyway, It was the midwife. Men have always been suspicious of these women, who know about the female secrets, And they know potions and herbs, and they touch other women at indecent spots, They also knew how to remove the fruit in the body, this “gift of God”, Ergo: The midwife is a witch and murderer, Case closed. All that is needed is her confession, under torture when necessary, And this is were Jakob Kuisl comes into play, because torturing is part of his job other parts include garbage collector and medical practitioner, The hangman doesnt believe in the midwifes guilt and secretly conducts an investigation by himself in which he is aided by Simon Fronwieser, who is the son of the towns physician, and who not only has an eye for the hangmans impressive library of medical textbooks but also and mostly on his eldest daughter Magdalena, a young woman how is as pretty as she is smart.
Soon a second child is found dead and things start to escalate
I wasnt so much interested in the actual murdermystery story, although it contains all the necessary ingredients of the genre which makes it exciting and a pageturner.
Plus: It contains “the devil” himself or perhaps not For me, the description of life and death in a city in Germany in the middle of theth century, not long after theyear war, was the most captivating.
Here the author obviously has done his homework and presents the results in a credible way, In an afterword he writes: This book is a novel and not a scientific seminar paper, I have tried to stick to the facts as much as possible, Nevertheless, I often had to simplify for dramatic reasons,
Besides, I never gave much thought on what an executioner actually does when he is not executing, In the book and also on the authors website you can learn a lot more about this rather strange profession, and also that Jakob Kuisl actually existed and was even a distant ancestor of the author: sitelink de/en/diewelt
Also, I'm generally interested in theyear War, Even though it ended over a decade ago, this war still casts a shadow on the people, All protagonists are dragging around their own experiences, In some flashbacks, for example, the euphemistically called “sitelinkMagdeburg Wedding” is shown in some very brutal images, In general it can be said that the book is not necessarily something for the faint at heart, Right in the prologue, for example, an execution is described which is carried out by the father of Jakob Kuisl and which fails thoroughly, And then there are the scenes in which the alleged “witch” gets tortured, But here the author also holds back a little, and the violence is clearly not shown for its own sake, but necessary to drive the plot.
And those things happened, alas,
Even tough this book has overpages I would have read it faster than I did, After all, the author calls it an “entertainment novel”, and that is true, The prose is not particularly challenging, Nevertheless, I had to take a break every now and then and start my own little researches, Sometimes the most interesting things hide behind the smallest details, For instance theres a book mentioned called sitelinkDe Materia Medica, Its a textbook on herbal medicine in five volumes, written betweenandCE, and still in use in theth century Jakob Kuisl owns a copy.
Then there is the Lex Carolina, a, k. a. Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, the first body of German criminal law, published in, in which capital crimes are defined, like murder, manslaughter, etc but also witchcraft and which also lists the possible death penalties: burning, decapitation, quartering, wheeling, hanging, drowning, impaling, and burying alive.
As you can see, the hangman must bring quite a lot of skills, From this I also learned that “peinliche Befragung” doesnt mean “awkward interrogation” but rather “painful interrogation”, i, e. torture, coming from the word “Pein” “pain”, Like I said, the devils in the details,
There
are another six volumes of the hangmans daughter available who, by the way, is important here, but not the main character, I dont think Im going to read them all, but the second volume seems to be about a Dark Monk, That sounds rather intriguing, especially since the church got away too easy in the first volume, I think,
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