Review: Babylonne by Catherine Jinks
Babylonne
by Catherine Jinks
From the back cover: Early thirteenth-century Languedoc is a place of valor, violence, and persecution. At age sixteen, Babylonne has survived six bloody sieges. She’s tough, resourceful, and, now that her strict aunt and abusive grandmother intend to marry her off to a senile old man, desperate. Disguised as a boy, Babylonne embarks on an action-packed adventure that amounts to a choice: trust the mysterious Catholic priest - a sworn enemy of her Cathar faith - who says he’s a friend of her dead father or pursue a fairy-tale version of her future, one in which she’ll fight and likely die in a vicious war with the French.
Babylonne is a fast-paced novel aimed at teens, but it reads as if written for a younger audience. The language is very simple and modern, which can be a strength or a weakness, depending on whether you like your historical fiction to sound like its time and place. The plot is fairly simple, but if you don’t know anything about the Cathars and the conflict between the Good Christians and the Catholic Church, it’s very easy to get lost in the (lack of) history and background. (If I had not already read two books about the Cathars this year, I would have gotten confused and I’m sure a younger reader would have even more trouble.)
Our heroine Babylonne is a very modern girl. She seems to fancy herself the next Joan of Arc (or would, had Joan not come along 200 years later) and thanks to her Cathar upbringing seems woefully ignorant of the ways soldiers act and treat women. Yet she also claims to have lived through six sieges. There’s a logic disconnect there; I find it quite hard to believe that she would be able to maintain such a fairy tale mythology about noble soldiers if she has lived in a war zone most of her life. But I suppose teenagers are certainly capable of self-illusion, especially when they have an abusive home life, as Babylonne does.
In spite of these issues, I did find this book quite entertaining. Babylonne is quite likeable, if a bit anachronistic. She begins the book with very concrete, black-and-white ideas that she inherited from her mother’s family, but as she is exposed to more of the world outside a strict Cathar cloister she begins to doubt the old ideas and refine her beliefs. Her coming-into-awareness story is a good one. I only wish the world around her had been better explained.
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