Sometimes the headspace that you're in when you read a book matters, and I think this is one of those times. All throughout October I'd been binging horror and some generally violent books (it was spooky season after all), and I chose this one as a sort of a relaxing, cozy wind-down. Which is exactly what it was. Which is probably why I'm walking away from it wishing it were... well, more spooky and violent.

The potential was certainly there. This worldbuilding gave me the impression that the reader wasn't being shown everything that could and had happened in this setting. All kinds of things go bump in the night out in the woods, and the older the woods, the bigger the bumps. And this was an old wood where all sorts of characters had their histories passed down and bastardized until they were just local folk tales. When you get to meet these characters there is a vague sense of threatening power, but I got the impression they were pulling their punches.

In my opinion the climax happened a tad too early with the following exposition running on longer than I wished, which is saying something for a hundred-and-change page novella. The romance subplot left me feeling ambivalent and I feel like the overall story would've worked just as well had that relationship been more platonic. And I wish the loose depictions of fey magic (never use your real name with a well-dressed stranger who just walked out of the woods) and the ~true~ stories behind ancient local stories was leaned into harder.

I'd probably recommend this to whoever's looking for a quick, low-stakes fantasy romp that isn't set in a completely unrecognizable world.