Bog Queen by Anna North - Review

I can't remember where I heard of this book but I think someone I follow on Instagram was reading it. I asked Lee for it for Christmas, and picked it up in February. It's a really lovely novel, it felt like good literature and really interesting to read. 

There are two strands to the narrative. Firstly, in 2018, there is a post graduate student called Agnes who is called to help identify a body that has been found in a peat bog in Ludlow. She is American, and she's kind of a loner, and a bit strange? I liked her a lot, but she is odd. She has left behind her dad and her (ex?) fiance in America; her dad really wants her to go home but she's enjoying her life in Britain, even if she finds the English a bit baffling. She's very clever. 

The body is supposedly that of a woman who was murdered by her husband in the 1960s. He has confessed to the murder and says he buried her in the bog. Her relative (niece I think?) travels from Spain for her, etc. Only when Agnes starts her examination, she realised the body is much older than the 1960s. She is a perfectly preserved bog woman. Agnes realises that she has several injuries to her body, but that she survived most of them - she died from just one of them. Someone cared for her while she was ill.

Some environmentalists are interested in the bog and want to stop the police and archaeologists from digging there, because of the moss (which is kind of a strand in the book too, but I found that bit quite weird so didn't altogether read those little excerpts). Agnes tries to get them on side while also trying to work out who the bog woman is, and what her story is. 

The second narrative strand is of course of the bog woman herself, who remains unnamed which I liked, because she is unnamed in 2018 too. She is an Iron Age woman who is only around seventeen or eighteen. She is the local druid in her village and has been for a couple of years since she took over from her mother. She has a fight going on with her brother and his clan. At the very beginning of the book she leaves her village to travel to one of the Roman settlements in the south east of Britain - I think it's supposed to be Chelmsford - with her brother and a friend, Aesu and Crab. They run into trouble and I really liked their story. 

I loved the book and am giving it five out of five. It was just a really good read. I would definitely read something else by Anna North!