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Feb 15, 2018liljables rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
Hannah Kent's first novel, Burial Rites, really knocked my socks off, so I was very excited to read her latest offering, The Good People. The two novels are similar in many ways: they're both thoroughly researched historical fiction based on true events from the 1820s, focusing on the lives of women during that time, and the tension among religion, superstition, and science. In The Good People, Kent writes about a rural Irish village in which an unwell child is believed by some to be a changeling, the real child swept away by fairies. When a "conventional" doctor and the local priest can offer no solutions for the boy's ailments, the child's grandmother turns to the local wise woman for assistance. Although a cynical atheist like myself sees the church-sanctioned cures and the more mystical treatments as two sides of the same unlikely coin, the author writes about these warring factions with no condescension, capturing the fear of the unknown perfectly. I was completely captivated by this novel, and I'm already craving more from Hannah Kent.