This is a time travel book with a difference. It's a fantastic read - exciting, beautifully described, and with a real feel of authenticity about the 16th century. It's not just the drab clothing (bright colours are expensive, and only for best) or the smells (the animals are stabled on the ground floor) it's the attitudes and morals. Fat is attractive. Allegiance is to the family - the Sterkarms - not to truth, or justice, or fair play. And yet you can understand it - that's how things must have been when news travelled slowly, and laws were unenforceable. I believed in this society in a way I rarely have done in other books, and I found myself slowing down at the end because I didn't want to finish it. Fortunately, there's a sequel.