Review: The Sin Eater by Megan Campisi

May Owens always considered herself a goodly girl, and yet she is in prison. Orphaned, starving, and without options, the young woman’s hunger forced her hand. And while her fellow cellmates are sentenced to various grisly punishments, her crime of stealing a loaf of bread receives an entirely unexpected punishment, and the price is a heavy burden indeed.

For her crime, May is sentenced to be a Sin Eater; a woman cast out by the society that branded her to take upon her body the sins of the dying. For each sin named, there is an accompanying food that must be eaten before the dying can return top the Maker. Yet the reward for the Sin Eater’s task is thankless – they may not be touched, spoken tom, or looked out – they are the incarnation of sin, and they are feared and hated throughout the land.

Despite the awful punishment, and the loss, confusion and anguish which follow it, May tries her best to adjust to her new life under the silent and hostile gaze of the town. However, when the new Sin Eater accidentally uncovers a royal scandal that could change the very nature of her life, she must decide the best path to take; break her vow and speak up, or maintain her silence and her duty while people die.

There’s something darkly seductive about The Sin Eater. Between lines of dancing prose dwells a story that’s as shocking as it is intriguing, in which the world as we know it has been tweaked and shaped into a dazzling story about life’s unseen horrors. Campisi presents a belief system that it skewed, and a royal bloodline plagued by dissent, jealousy and murky secrets. Here, history is unreliable, witchcraft is blossoming, and religion is a many-faceted monster that causes as much good as it does pain. And yet the system remains unchallenged, fostering a sense of discomfort which builds throughout the narrative, culminating in well-earned pity for the protagonist, as well as a roaring anger at the multiple injustices of the world – both fictional and not.

The Sin Eater by Megan Campisi is published by Mantle, an imprint of Pan MacMillan.