Beautiful, thoughtful, unconventional fantasy that manages to be at once small-scale and personal (it takes place almost entirely within/around the manor house of a little farming village) and huge in its ideas (there is so much here about the nature of time, choice, and godhead). The world Walton creates is different from ours in several important ways, but she lets us into it in a way that makes it comfortable and familiar all the same. And I still love the use of present tense, the way it makes us part of Taveth's understanding of time to have "when she is a little girl" and "when she is an old woman" moments both be woven into the narrative alongside the week or so of the novel's major events.