The Maiden and Her Monster by Maddie Martinez Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Gothic, historical fantasy, horror, queer fiction, retellings
Pages: 352
Published by Tor Books on September 9, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
A gorgeous, atmospheric debut fantasy that reimagines the Jewish myth of golem in a tale rooted in history, folklore, and sapphic romance—perfect for fans of Katherine Arden, Ava Reid, Hannah Whitten, and Naomi Novik.
The forest eats the girls who wander out after dark.
As the healer’s daughter, Malka has seen how the curse of the woods has plagued her village, but when the Ozmini Church comes to collect their tithes, they don’t listen to the warnings about a monster lurking in the trees. After a clergy girl wanders too close to the forest and Malka’s mother is accused of her murder, Malka strikes a bargain with a zealot Ozmini priest. If she brings him the monster, he will spare her mother from execution.
When she ventures into the blood-soaked woods, Malka finds a monster, though not the one she expects: an inscrutable, disgraced golem who agrees to implicate herself, but only after Malka helps her free the imprisoned rabbi who created her.
But a deal easily made is not easily kept. And as their bargain begins to unravel a much more sinister threat, protecting her people may force Malka to endanger the one person she left home to save—and face her growing feelings for the very creature she was taught to fear.
My Review:
Malka’s village is caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock is the established Ozmini Church which has tithed her people to the breaking point for being non-believers. Her people are Yahadi, which, in this alternate fantasy world of quasi-Europe in a time similar but not quite the Middle Ages, are this world’s equivalent of the Jewish People.
And, of course, just as the church did in real history, the Jews are fair game to be accused of any crime and automatically convicted, to be imprisoned and executed without trial, to be maimed for looking at a clergyman or a church knight in whatever manner is called ‘wrong’ at the moment, for any women who protest being raped to be beaten to death. This has all literally happened before and may all happen again.
The woods that surround Malka’s village, once a source of food animals and healing herbs, are now dark, dangerous and deadly. The woods eat women. They also turn formerly edible animals into poisonous monsters. The woods take what the church does not.
Putting Malka herself between that rock and that hard place. The churchmen have taken her mother for execution for a crime committed by the deadly woods and its monsters. The church would rather accuse a Yahadi because it furthers their narrative of using the Yahadi as scapegoats in order to gather more power instead of investigating the villagers’ claims that there is a monster in the forest.
Malka takes her life and her mother’s life into her own hands, and bargains with the clergy to go into the woods, kill the monster and bring the body back to prove her mother’s innocence. Malka bargains in desperation and in good faith. She’ll brave the woods and make the attempt – or die trying. Probably the latter.
The clergyman’s faith in this bargain is questionable. On all sides and for all possible motives. But Malka believes because she HAS TO.
And that’s where her true story begins, and leads her to THE true story behind the evil that has taken hold of the woods that surround her home – and the country of which they are a part. That, along the way, Malka learns that the monster she believed to be the scourge of her people is the love of her life, and that the magic of her people that she has been taught to fear is the greatest gift of her faith, are only part of the lessons that she needs to learn in order to save her mother, her people, and herself.
Escape Rating A: The story of The Maiden and Her Monster stands on two foundations, one is the very real and terrible history of Antisemitic persecution across all of Europe during the Middle Ages. The second is a response in Jewish folklore to that persecution, the tale of “The Golem of Prague”, where a great rabbi, the Maharal of Prague, builds a golem out of clay in order to protect his people from persecution.
From those two starting points, the author has crafted a dark fantasy world that skates right on the edge of horror, giving that horror not the face of the monster as one might expect, but rather the human face of greedy and rapacious men who believe the righteousness of their own cause and the inevitability of their own power and don’t care who is sacrificed for their so-called ‘greater good’.
As if that weren’t enough to make a fantastic and fantastical story, layered on top of that foundation is an equally dark sapphic romantasy, as Malka falls in love, not with the good man who has tagged along on her quest but rather the female monster she once feared, hated and reviled at every turn. That love builds slowly and inexorably, step by reluctant step, even as they do their damndest to wound each other and push each other far away.
At the same time, even though the horror and the adventure and the romance along with a daring rescue and a desperate, last chance to defeat an evil that has very nearly won, there’s also a marvelously written meditation on the power of stories themselves, the power to move mountains, to inspire people, but also to hold them back in fear. That the point of view from which a story is told affects every retelling thereafter, and that the most triumphant of tales can conceal the darkest of motives.
There is a LOT to savor in The Maiden and Her Monster. The language is beautiful, the story is a desperate walk through very dark places that ultimately turns towards the light, and it’s an epic love story that springs from the rockiest of beginnings. This is one to literally ‘read it and weep’ with the understanding at the end that ‘not all tears are evil.’
