Juniper & Thorn: A Novel

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I also had a problem with how her character and importance were constantly, irrevocably attached to and defined by the men in her life: her father, Sevastyan, Dr Bakay. Every sentence in this novel is striking, with imagery and prose that threatened to devour me whole. I simply cannot connect with her characters and stories no matter how much I try, and it's frustrating because Ava Reid's playing ground of choice is Slavic lore. Marlinchen’s relationship with her sisters was messy, was awful, set them apart, showed what they all had to do to themselves and to each other to survive living under their father, regardless if that meant throwing someone else to their father’s rage. Following the plain-face, too-dutiful, third-daughter of the last living Wizard in this land, we're swallowed whole by a story of loveless existences and the power in escapes.

And how the ending did nothing, in my eyes, to remedy that, which completely negated any growth she might have achieved over the course of the story. We have penny presses and phrenology and day workers in factories alongside a wizard whose wife was turned into a bird and who has an old god satyr living in his garden. If you’re at all familiar with The Juniper Tree, then it’s safe to assume this book has a similar level of content.

Like taking a bite of fruit with a rotten core, the atmosphere is in turns gorgeous and enticing, then shocking and disgusting, and back again. chef’s kiss* Marlinchen and Sevas have both been treated in unspeakable ways by the people they should be able to trust and rely on more than any one (common for those who have experienced SA, particularly CSA), and there’s an innate beauty in seeing Marlinchen and Sevas them come together and discover how much power they hold and feed into the other. As a fairy tale retelling, I think this book generally does a good job of taking the roots of The Juniper Tree and transforming it into something interesting and new that still stays true to the bloody heart of the original (extremely grim and grisly) tale.

I was incredibly excited to be able to continue to support them and read more of their work… and a fantasy-horror retelling of Grimm’s darkest fairytale? Undine and Rose had no personalities beyond being more beautiful than Marlinchen, and therefore they were almost completely irrelevant to the narrative; and Sevastyan was just, I dunno, a cornfield ("I think it would make me very happy to see your face in the crowd", kill me now please). As the city of Oblya veers away from its magic roots and industry grows, their fathers grip on the girls and their magic grows tighter and tighter by day. From the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Wolf and the Woodsman comes a gothic retelling of The Juniper Tree , where a young witch seeks to discover her identity and escape the domination of her abusive wizard father. As Oblya’s last true witches, she and her sisters are little more than a tourist trap as they treat their clients with archaic remedies and beguile them with nostalgic charm.

Ava Reid’s beautiful prose felt oddly out of place in this horror b And it challenges not only the main character, but the audience to digest these topics while viewing the characters and the story as whole and complex and utterly human. This is a perfect example of how to handle seriously disturbing things and actions while being able to keep your audience engaged.

It also didn't sit well with me the way Marlinchen insinuated that bad things would never happen to her sisters, because they're so pretty that men wouldn't dare to touch them. Reid has been frank and open about how much of this book reflects their own experiences and I felt like they handled that portrayal through the perspective of a main character masterfully. Since humanity began recording their stories, we’ve used fairytales to explore the darkness inside us and around us and explain that monsters can come from within as easily as they can stalk us through the woods.Marlinchen and her two sisters live with their wizard father in a city shifting from magic to industry. What was a story except a berry you ate over and over again, until your lips and tongue were red and every word you spoke was poison?