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Every summer, after the academic year ends, Jessie Morton goes to Myrtle Beach's Renaissance Faire Village, where she apprentices herself to a variety of craftsmen (and seems to sleep with most of them). This year, she is working for Mary Shift, a Gullah woman who weaves baskets, an enterprise that has nothing to do with the Renaissance, as Jessie admits. All goes well, though Jessie keeps cutting her fingers on the sweet grass and bleeding into her baskets, until a man who turns out to be Mary's estranged husband is found strangled, behind one of the privies. Since Mary's husband ran her out of their home, taking their son (who, he told her, died) and giving him to his brother to raise, Mary is, for a long time, the only suspect. Jessie and her current lover, Chase Manhattan (!) are both convinced of Mary's innocence and are equally convinced that the culprit is Abraham, the brother-in-law who raised her now resurrected son, a young man who appears at the village in search of the mother who abandoned him. Everyone in the village seems to be related to one another or sleeping with them - Mary's brother is the blacksmith, Ham. Jessie's wastrel (and very unappealing) brother is an employee of the village. Mary has been having a long-term relationship with the glass blower; Jessie has had summer flings with several of the craftsmen and is now involved with the bailiff, Chase. One wishes there were more appealing characters. Jessie is mostly a pain. Mary is perpetually sulky. The son, Jah, is simply a caricature of anger. The only really likeable people are Chase and Griggs, a policeman assigned to protect the village who ultimately turns in his badge to work permanently at the Faire. I have never been to a Faire, though there are a few in the Massachusetts area, for the same reason I don't watch so-called "reality" TV shows, so I don't know whether the authors' strange chronology is deliberate or not. Robin Hood and his merry men appear, excoriating King John, who lived in the 13th century (remember the Magna Carta). Nor do I have any idea what relationship Little Bo Peep and Mother Goose have to the Renaissance. Perhaps they inspired Botticelli.
Reviewed by Mary Elizabeth Devine, October 2008
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