Nettle & Bone

This fantasy has fairytale resonances, although it doesn’t follow a specific tale as far as I can tell. It was an easy enough read, but also easy to put down without feeling the need to continue. The story’s told in third person, past tense from Marra’s viewpoint. Sometimes, like her, I found myself wondering what I was doing there.

Given that Marra was supposed to be 30, she seemed far younger. I could accept some amount of unworldliness after half her life in a convent, but she struck me as more slow on the uptake than that. (It didn’t help that a lot of her internal thoughts stated or restated what had already explicitly obvious).

The book starts with a dark tone, then evolves into something else. It’s mainly… a road trip with a handful of contrasting characters. Mood varied and felt inconsistent. I felt the story couldn’t decide whether it was a fairytale or a buddy adventure with snark, bickering and banter. (Fair enough, I occasionally chuckled at the interactions). If it was more of a fairytale, I could probably overlook odd logic (like Marra at the age of 30 becoming replacement wife in order to provide a much-needed heir?) but as it was, the random-seeming plot drivers put me off.

I read this thinking I hadn’t previously read anything by the author. But on coming to write this review, I notice I read A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking last year and also The Seventh Bride the year before that. My thoughts for those two books were similar to here. A protagonist who acts younger than we’d expect, who follows the plot rather than moving it, and a story without many “Ah! So that’s how it all comes together!” moments. As before, this would maybe appeal to younger readers than myself.

This book is one of my comfort reads, the audiobook read by Amara Jasper is excellent. The book itself is full of characters that are well developed and likeable, with the evil prince being a character who is the embodiment of toxic masculinity - most people, I think, have run across someone like this. It does include some really dark subjects, so why do I say it's a comfort read? Because even though it's a fairy tale, even though these subjects are dark, they are real things that happen to real people, and yet, as is so often the case with well written characters, because they care for their goal, which is love for another person, they face these things. There is also no sugar coating, no toxic positivity. In that, there is a sense that we, too - we real people - can do the same, when facing terrible things of our own. And for that reason, it is a comfort read. Not an easy story, but a very rewarding one.

It's a fantastic depiction (as far as a man can tell) of the hardships women face. It's not a new topic, but it's so well done here that it still feels fresh and makes the whole book. We see a lot of woman characters, and each of them is a whole story. They end up very different (and all extremely likable) as they handle their challenges differently.

Or maybe I'm wrong about this? We don't learn anything about the past of the dust-wife or Agnes. We only see Marra's mother and Kania from a distance. I still feel like I know their story. This is the magic of brilliant characterization.

The writing is beautifully crafted. The dialogs are all amazing. Every line feels completely unpredictable and yet spot-on for the character. The pacing is great. Every little bit of detail is used in some way to say something interesting. For example, Marra's faith has little bearing on the story, but we learn this:

"We're a mystery religion," said the abbess, when she'd had a bit more wine than usual, "for people who have too much work to do to bother with mysteries. So we simply get along as best we can. Occasionally someone has a vision, but [Our Lady of Grackles] doesn't seem to want anything much, and so we try to return the favor."

"It's all right," he said. "I've done many things that were terribly important, lives hanging in the balance and so on and so forth. There is something pleasant about chopping wood. If I miss a stroke, nothing awful happens. If a piece of wood is not quite right, it will still burn. If I stack it and it isn't perfect, clans will not fall."

I really enjoyed this fantasy slash fairy tale quest story about a youngest daughter working to try to free her elder sister from abuse. It has fresh worldbuilding, many characters with depth, multiple older women characters, and ultimately a story about working together to free people from powerful and abusive men.

I think the weakest part of the book was the romance angle for me. It was cute, but I felt like I was missing some extra characterization about "why these two" other than just romance-through-proximity. This was all a bit of a surprise for me, as I quite enjoyed the various T. Kingfisher sad paladin romances. (One could make a good argument that Fenris may as well also be yet another sad paladin, which doesn't help here either.)

That said, I feel like the romance was an exceptionally small part of the book (arguably much smaller than other books in the same genre of story) and so don't let that put you off. I just feel like the story would have been more powerful had there not been as much understated flirting there and they had just been buddies working together to right wrongs (or even some explicit aro or ace angle, which is how I had been reading Marra the rest of the book).

I wouldn't describe this as a comedy book, but there were so many funny moments to the book that I had to hold myself back from posting a dozen quotes. I laughed so hard at the dust-wife's exasperation leading into her third impossible task (and it was such good characterization too). Overall, this was a lot of fun but I also found it to have quite a bit more depth than I was expecting.