A rootless orphan is adopted into a starving village’s heart in Sandrine Collette’s striking novel Madelaine Before the Dawn.
La Foye sits at the edge of the world, cut off from civilization by a winding river. The peasants who inhabit it are beholden to the Ambroisies, the youngest of whom is especially cruel. People’s days are directed by privation, fear, and a sense that “life’s not as it should be.” But then the village healer, Rose, and her charge, Bran (“a sort of ghost, a trace of vanished beings”), while intent on rustling out an egg thief, discover an orphaned girl in their midst.
Enchanting Madelaine is “tender and wild,” a feral child who fled from famine. She is taken in by Ambre, the childless half of feared, desired twins. She is defiant of rules and norms. Attacked, she threatens to slit a man’s throat instead of submit. Given a hatchet, she becomes an expert thrower. She hunts on the lords’ lands despite the threat of death; she forages and works the fields with determination unmatched by the village’s heartiest boys. In part because Madelaine is untameable, those around her seem willing to die to protect her. It is a reciprocal inclination.
Collette captures the brutal rhythms of medieval village life with expertise, including widespread hunger deaths in the depths of winter and farmers’ hopes washed away by fierce rains. Madelaine’s cousin is felled by tetanus after an accident; an arrow meant for her hits her protector instead. Flour is cut with sawdust out of desperation. Against these cruel banalities stands Madelaine—lovely, unbroken, and forged for heroism by a lifetime of disappointments mixed with unexpected joys.
In the gripping novel Madelaine Before the Dawn, a wiry orphan sharpens her vigilante instincts to defend the villagers who took her in.
