Novik can write. So there's that.

This is a light thing, a romance - I don't mean love although there is that too.

It is a heavy thing, monstrosities lurking beneath clear waters.

At first reading it seems to be running in Angela Carter territory, and to be informed by Maria Tatar, Jack Zipes and Marian Warner.

Now I've read it for the second time. It's as if Granny Weatherwax were to have been apprenticed to one of the professors at the Unseen University. Novik does rather labour her binarities : Apollonian vs Dionysian, male vs female, particular vs universal and so on. There's also a sense that the author changes her mind about what to do with certain of her characters; the King and the Crown Prince are set up as actors and then just drop out of the tale. Similarly, one of the court wizards is introduced in some detail, then disappears without having done anything. Loaded guns litter the stage while the main characters carry on regardless.

However, the book carries the reader along with it, and is pleasurable to read. It doesn't quite have Carter's way with words, or the keen critique that informed her work: like so much fantasy writing it is overly constrained by the courtly conventions of the polite fairy tale, despite nodding at the grimmer side of Grimm.