The Starving Saints

by Caitlin Starling

🐣🐣🐣🐣🐣🐣

6/5 ducklings - yes, that's 6 ducklings, no I'm not good at math, but that's not relevant here. It's my rating system, I can do what I want.

tl;dr You’ll question your everything you eat after reading this book. Not to mention your faith in literally anything.

This is far and away the best book I have read this year. I don’t even know how to put into words what it was like reading this thing and how it made me feel. But I’m a writer, so I’ll do my damnedest.

Also, full disclosure, I went to Catholic school for my formative years. This will be relevant later.

Imagine a medieval world that’s just a step to the left of ours. Imagine a nation at war and a castle under siege. Imagine this siege has gone on for months and food is running low, the kitchens are bare, the gardens picked clean, the last of the rats snatched from the forgotten corners of the keep.

Imagine you are a knight, sworn to serve a king, forced to sheath your sword and play babysitter to a madwoman.

Imagine you are a servant girl, except not really, driven to survive and sworn to revenge against the woman who destroyed your life.

Imagine you are a nun, disgraced and faithless, tasked with performing another miracle and answerable no one and nothing except the pursuit of knowledge beyond your order.

And then one day, that miracle finally happens. The answer to your frantic, desperate, hollow prayers walks through the gates, giving you purpose, motivation, knowledge.

Imagine that this miracle isn’t at all what it seems.

Deep breath, y’all, this is gonna be a long one.

I have never read a book that has made me think so much about so many heavy topics without ever feeling preachy or judgmental: faith and what it means to lose it, duty and sacrifice and who deserves those things, what it truly means to get what you want, and what real, absolute power fees like.

Ser Voyne, the aforementioned knight, spends most of this book in thrall to others: her king, her god, her madwoman, the monster in the dark. Trellia, the servant girl, except not really, is bent on revenge against Sir Voyne for killing her father and destroying her life, for the months she spent starving in the woods and all things she did to survive it. Phosyne, the nun-turned-madwoman, is desperate to follow up her one and only miracle, fearing she will crack under the pressure of saving so many lives.

My very first thought when reading this book was that the intersections of the tree POV characters’ lives felt so organic and natural, intertwined in ways that felt normal and casual for this world. I often feel like characters are forced together in ways that feel contrived or convenient, especially in books with multiple POVs. Right away, I was hooked.

From there, things get weirder, bleaker and far more horrific. A false god shows up, promising food, comfort and salvation. All three women react in reasonable and destructive ways to the upending of their entire worlds. Voyne, at first, leans hard on her faith in her king and her religion. Her god appears before her, offering the very thing that will save her people, of course she would see a miracle, especially after her king has drastically underutilized her skills and sets her as minder for Phosyne.

Treilia, who is only trapped in Aymar Castle because she is hellbent on getting revenge on Voyne for killing her father, knows straight away their saviors are false and immediately seeks a way out, extorting a starving Phosyne with food to get her to help. When she finally finds a way out, the cost makes her question her strength and the choices that brought her here.

Phosyne is a disillusioned and excommunicated nun of the same holy order as the god that appears, and knows her knowledge has outstripped that of her peers. She knows she is capable of miracles, but not of how to understand those miracles. Her logic is not always linear, nor can she explain the the leaps her mind takes to reach the conclusions she’s does, no matter that they feel so right and sometimes produce real, tangible results. The appearance of this god shows her how little she really knows and that her next miracle will only come when she has chiseled away the bedrock of her world.

This book is intricately constructed, with the three main character grappling with the heavy themes of the book in distinct, yet related ways. Each woman has her faith tested, but with each of them having placed their faith in different things, the tests play out widely differently for each of them. All three of them want something and have to decide whether getting it is worth the price. They each have a duty and react differently to the pressure to perform it. Lastly, is what they do when they are presented with the opportunity to take power and what they do once they have it.

For me, the most interesting parts of this book were those where the characters discussed their faith, especially their doubts in it. Most of my early childhood was spent in the Catholic religion: school, church, youth group, sports. It was my entire circle of peers, it was everything I knew from the time I was five until I was almost fifteen. After that, my relationship with faith became more complicated; long before I came out as queer, the structures chaffed, like an ill fitting suit of armor (or plaid pleated uniform skirt, in this case). I already found I didn’t fit into the box the church expected of me, even if I didn’t know why. And after I finally did come out, those expectations felt like a noose and whatever faith I had in the institution of the church and the God it professed to be forgiving, disintegrated.

All of this to say, I am a recovering Catholic, as the youths like to say. So when this book opened with a nun and a church service, I was highly skeptical, and when the discussion turned to the loss of faith in the religion in which you were raised, I was positively crawling out of my skin with discomfort.

But Caitling Starling handles the topic so beautifully without sugar coating any of it or shaming either the character or the reader. By the time the story starts, Treilia’s faith in anything kind has been destroyed, the only thing she has left is her own ability, wits and determination. Phosyne, who is probably the most straightforward parallel, has basically educated herself out of her faith, seeking knowledge her order deems heretical, and she must rebuild her entire life and worldview with little support.

But it is Ser Voyne I related to the most. She is a knight who is lauded as a war hero, despite failing to prevent a massacre. In the wake of this, the king keeps her confined to the castle, showing her off like a trophy, galling her further by assigning her to babysit Phosyne, whom Voyne thinks is a mad at best and a heretic at worst.

Up to this point, she has held unwavering faith in the king, rivaled only by her faith in the Constant Lady. Even as she begins to doubt the king, when apparent salvation arrives, she trusts both him and their god to put the safety of their people first.

At first, it’s everything she dreamed, she is once again her king’s most trusted knight, her Lady reminds her of her love for her people, her protective nature, and physical strength. And still, as things become stranger, darker, and the Lady persuades her to act against the teachings of the nuns and her own moral compass, she rejoices in her rediscovered sense of purpose and value.

Bit by bit, she looses faith in her king, just as mile by mile, her faith in the Constant Lady consumes her, closing her eyes to the increasingly terrible things this god asks her to do in its name. It literally blinds her to Treilia’s presence, making Voyne unable to see, hear or even speak her name.

It is only when Phosyne reminds her of her anger at the king that Voyne begins to understand that something is dreadfully wrong and starts extricating herself from the hold the Lady has over her. Even with the madwoman’s help, Voyne struggles to disentwine herself from the trappings and habits of faith.

And it is this part that struck me so hard. It’s relevant to me personally and also to the context of the sociopolitical climate in the U.S. right now. So often, people carry out the motions of their faith in whatever higher power without question or thought. Now, before you tell me that is the literal definition of faith, I know. But I’m talking about the people who don’t believe, the people for whom the practice and language of belief are more habit or the path of least resistance, than real belief. There is no meaning behind the motions, it’s just what they’ve always done and they keep doing it because it’s easy.

The extension of this argument is that people use the habit of their faith to keep from having to change anything about themselves and their worldview. The rote practice of faith allows people to hold onto their bigotry and prejudices because that’s just what their faith says to do because they heard it that way once and stopped actively participating in their faith. They're just coasting and feel validated when they look around and their friends are doing to same things. I think this is how you end up with Christians who profess to follow the Bible and a loving God, but can justify hatred of anyone who is not like them.

Extricating yourself from religion, especially one that was part of a foundational period of your life, is inexpressibly hard. It can take years to understand who you are outside of that context and without those habitual pillars to fall back on. Even once you realize that your religion or faith or belief is actively hurting you, those thoughts and practices can be so ingrained in you that it’s nearly impossible to tell what are your own thoughts and feelings and what is just the things you were told to think and feel. Voyne has an entire identify crisis about who she it outside her knighthood. Without that, without a king to serve and sword to swing, what use is she?

Voyne’s journey is reflective of the uneven path away from a belief system that no longer serves you. She has an epiphany and is motivated to leave, but then she sees her friends and family still in it and she relapses. Then something drastic happens and she makes another effort to break away, only to catch sight of the Lady ready to make her feel useful and valued, and backslides again. It takes work and help from others, and a giant dose of self-compassion. Voyne knows she did terrible things on behalf of the Constant Lady, and feels guilty about it knowing she can never take back what she did, and all she can do is be different, better, in the future.

Eventually, Voyne must learn to have faith in herself, in her own judgement and inherent humanity. That is a choice she makes and has to keep making for the remainder of the book. Even when she has a moment of near crippling doubt and still has to make the decision to have faith in herself and not fall back onto the well-worn paths of what she left behind.

Wow…I told you all this would be long, but I didn’t think it would be this long. Sorry not sorry.

I will be thinking about this book for a long time. It’s incredibly written, Starling’s prose is sparse and lyrical, somehow making the slow descent of Aymar Castle’s population into deranged, cannibalistic bacchanal seem romantic.

Dread suffused the entire thing, building slowly and leaving me with a creeping sense of uncanniness that stretched my nerves to the breaking point without my noticing. I’ve only been unsettled like this by a piece of media once or twice in my entire life. This one is going to live rent free in my head for at least the next decade. You need to read this book.

And now I have to go read everything Caitlin Starling has ever written. Seriously, this book was so good that I’m too scared to pick up another book because I know it won’t live up to this.

I have so many more thoughts that I want to get out there, so I might be back with a part two to discuss the danger of the unrestrained pursuit of knowledge, so keep an eye out for that.

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