As I’ve mentioned in my posts, my husband and I uprooted our life in Arizona a while back. We moved to Davis, California. After the move, I had to build a new network of local, face-to-face writer friends. That included critique partners.
It Takes a Village to Write a Book
Fortunately, these days, a lot of interacting can happen online and, indeed, my longtime critique group in Phoenix was already meeting online because of covid. Therefore, I got to keep them as part of my writer’s “village.”
But, nonetheless, I missed sitting across a table, talking about the big developmental issues that go into writing the kind of fiction I write. It involves multiple plots and subplots, empire-spanning geography, and off-the-beaten-track history. Thus, I searched for some new critique partners.
Reading with a Writer’s Eye
So, in full disclosure, the author of the book reviewed below is one of these new critique friends. What that means is that I read his book with a highly critical writer eye. I wanted to see if we’d be good editors of each other’s fiction. I did not find him lacking at all. You’ll enjoy The Wool Translator as much as I enjoy sitting across the table from Tim “plotting” novels.
Review of The Wool Translator by Tim Schooley
Schooley shows great skill in building a far-reaching, clever, and emotionally engaging historical plot that twines together characters who at first seem impossibly unrelated. These fully-developed characters step into his tale from across the medieval world. They come from England, Paris, Bruges, Granada, and elsewhere in the 15th century Nasrid kingdom of southern Spain.
From All the Corners of the Medieval World
Part of the fun of reading The Wool Translator is watching how Schooley will pull a French priest studying at the Universities of Paris into the same story as Newt, a linguistically-too-smart-for-his-own good English youngster. Then Schooley throws into the mix Aisha, a Muslim girl who is a mathematical prodigy. How on earth could these three ever cross paths? It’s masterfully done. Everything in their worlds is designed to keep them apart.
Keeping Two Minds Apart
Being kept apart turns out to be the point when to the reader’s delight, the twisty plot brings Newt and Aisha together under the insufficiently alert eye of the French priest. The two brilliant young people, who do not fit comfortably into their respective worlds, turn out to find “home” in each other’s souls. That is not going to be a smooth road, but watching its bumps and dead ends is fascinating. This isn’t a romance, although there is a very determined pair who love each other at its core. There are multiple themes winding around the gradual development of this relationship and the determined way each of their families and society at large do everything they can to prevent these two unusual young people from finding settled happiness.
Will the world win or two brilliant, creative minds? In any case, each character grows and conquers so much that defining a win or a loss for them is a profound challenge, as Schooley reflects the fullness of nuances and complexities in these medieval lives.
Finding a Copy of The Wool Translator
If you’d like to buy a copy of The Wool Translator, you can find it on Amazon.
You can also find The Wool Translator on Bookshop.org.
For more about Tim Schooley, you can look at his website.
Another Book that Spans the Medieval World
If The Wool Translator sounds like a good read, you might also enjoy reading my review of Guy Gavriel Kay’s A Brightness Long Ago.