Genre: fairy tales

#AudioBookReview: Cinder House by Freya Marske

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B+ Reviews> book reviews
#AudioBookReview: Cinder House by Freya MarskeCinder House by Freya Marske
Narrator: Anna Burnett
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fairy tales, fantasy, fantasy romance
Pages: 144
Length: 4 hours and 34 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tordotcom on October 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Sparks fly and lovers dance in this gorgeous, yearning Cinderella retelling from bestselling author Freya Marske—a queer Gothic romance perfect for fans of Naomi Novik and T. Kingfisher.
Ella is a haunting.
Murdered at sixteen, her ghost is furiously trapped in her father's house, invisible to everyone except her stepmother and stepsisters.
Even when she discovers how to untether herself from her prison, there are limits. She cannot be seen or heard by the living people who surround her. Her family must never learn she is able to leave. And at the stroke of every midnight, she finds herself back on the staircase where she died.
Until she forges a wary friendship with a fairy charm-seller, and makes a bargain for three nights of almost-living freedom. Freedom that means she can finally be seen. Danced with. Touched.
You think you know Ella's story: the ball, the magical shoes, the handsome prince.
You're halfway right, and all-the-way wrong.
Rediscover a classic fairy tale in this debut novella from "the queen of romantic fantasy" (Polygon).
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

My Review:

Just as the blurb says, you think you know this story. If you’ve ever read Marissa Meyer’s Cinder, or Alix E. Harrow’s Fractured Fables duology (A Spindle Splintered and A Mirror Mended) you may think you have a handle on all the variations on this story as well.

We’ve all grown up on it, after all, thanks to Disney. The wicked stepsisters, the drudge who wants to go to the ball, the fairy godmother (or mothers), the prince, the shoes. And all those elements are here in Cinder House.

And so is Ella. Or, at least, in this case, the ghost of Ella, trapped in the house where she was murdered, still serving as the drudge of all work for her murderous stepmother and her stepsisters, one evil and one just as trapped in her own way as Ella is in hers.

Ella’s stepmother may be the one who killed her, but it’s the house itself that has trapped her. Because the house is sentient. It can’t speak, not exactly, but it still needs a way to express its grief and its anger, and it needs a vessel to hold its grudges. Ella is its hands, its voice, and its only possibility for revenge.

All it has to do is watch and wait and let Ella’s suffering fester within its walls, driving her towards revenge for them both. Unless, with the help of a literal fairy godmother, Ella can find a way out from under both her family and her family’s house that no one ever imagined.

UK cover because its pretty AND pretty descriptive at the same time!

Escape Rating B+: I picked this up because this was the only novella among this year’s Hugo nominees that I hadn’t read. I remember checking it out multiple times and then skipping over it, probably because I did think I knew the story. In the end, well, I LOVED the end. That was perfect. And all the stuff about Ella being a ghost and the way that worked was a new and different way of handling Ella’s situation and just the way that ghostliness worked overall was well done.

I think my mixed feelings are in just how much of the early part of the story was taken up in detailing, not Ella’s ghostly situation because that was fascinating, but her continuing abuse at the hands of one of her stepsisters who was both a sorceress AND a psychopath. Not that all of that didn’t need to be established, not that it wasn’t important to the story, but there was a lot of “oh woe is me” that was just more than I wanted no matter how justified it was. And it was.

How Ella’s ghostliness worked was fascinating, and new and different. But her stepsisters’ treatment of her was old and sad and a bit overdone for my personal taste. As is often the case for me, when I listen to a book, as I did with Cinder House, when the narrator is good, as Anna Burnett certainly was, I find myself feeling a bit too much for the character’s personal travails because I’m too much inside their head. Which makes the listening experience simultaneously excellent and uncomfortable.

Howsomever, as I said, the ending of this was terrific AND terrifically unexpected in the way that it worked out. And not just because a happy ending in a romance between a ghost and a living human is a bit of a puzzle to arrange. The unconventionality of the arrangement between the Prince, his political bride, his ghost and her two best friends was a surprise and a delight. I wasn’t expecting the way it worked out AT ALL but I was very happy that it did – if not quite as happy as they were!

#BookReview: The Girl Who Made a Mouse From Her Grandfather’s Whiskers by Kenneth Hunter Gordon

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: The Girl Who Made a Mouse From Her Grandfather’s Whiskers by Kenneth Hunter GordonThe Girl Who Made a Mouse From Her Grandfather’s Whiskers by Kenneth Hunter Gordon
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: fairy tales, science fantasy, science fiction
Pages: 160
Published by Lanternfish Press on March 17, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In a distant future, a little girl named Anny makes toy mice out of scraps and dust. Anny has never seen a real mouse, just as she’s never seen the planet her family came from many generations ago. All she knows is her home, Tsedt: an isolated village of human colonists’ descendants and their friendly helper robots.
But then one day the Amau arrive in Tsedt: plastic people with luminous eyes, intent on taking young humans to the distant city of Harbor to be educated. It’s not long before Anny is flown away to a place unlike any she’s seen before.

My Review:

What would fairy tales look like on a world that, once upon a time, was settled by human colony ships? Somehow, the idea of Aesop or B’rer Fox and B’rer Rabbit, or even the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, still being the stories that children get told to help them cope with the world or get life and morality lessons, doesn’t quite work. (Disney might make it, but imagining what that would look like would be a different book entirely!)

That Anny’s remote village is a farming village that reads like somewhere in fantasy land makes the story itself feel like fantasy. That little Anny’s best friends are the veritable army of mice made out of scraps and fluff that she keeps under her bed AND, more importantly, writes stories about in her head, just adds to that impression of fae and fantasy.

At least until her grandfather – and his helper robot, Oskar – move in. Not because of Oskar, as there are plenty of “billies” (short for habilibots) around the little village. They just don’t personally impinge on Anny’s childhood all that much.

But because of her grandfather. Grandfather who remembers the early days of the colony, and, more important for the story, the early days of the city that grew up around the colony ships and their landing site. His memories, as interpreted through Oskar, disturb the peace of the household even though they seem like, well, fairy tales. Or the product of the disordered mind of an old man who is losing it. Or both.

And that’s the point where the story takes a turn into the Twilight Zone. Literally if you squint a bit. Because the people from the city, now called Harbor, suddenly find the little village. And start making the kind of offers that people – at least young people in a small village dreaming of more – mostly don’t want to refuse.

A trip to the ‘big city’. A chance to see the world outside their tiny village. The hope of a new, bigger, better, brighter, life. Grandfather knows it’s all a lie, but no one wants to listen.

Except little Anny. When the people from Harbor come for her, she knows she’s in danger – even if she isn’t quite able to understand why or how. She can tell that their truth is not THE truth, and that she needs to find a way to escape. If she can.

And that’s when the mice, not just her mice, and not just the mouse she made with her grandfather’s whiskers, come to her rescue so that she has a chance to rescue her family. Even if Anny, with the help of the mice, has to destroy much of Harbor in the process.

Escape Rating B: At first, I had a bit of a time getting into this one. I think you kind of have to just go with it for a bit and let it grab you. Or you have to settle into Anny’s perspective and stop worrying about whether what she’s telling you is happening is REAL, just in her imagination, or actually a child’s interpretation of events that are above her head but all around her.

In that sense, it reminded me of One Level Down, as we’re also seeing that SFnal world from a child’s perspective, at least at first. That world is every bit as cruel in its way as Anny’s world is in hers, and Anny has to break herself out by reaching a perspective of a less child-like version of herself.

Anny’s world is just that bit less cruel because the terrible things that happen to her are caused by outside agencies, where the child in One Level Down is betrayed by her own family. So there’s a bit of a remove that helps the reader ease into things here.

The reader, on the outside looking in, knows that the situation in Harbor is not a damn thing like the people from Harbor present it to be. Anyone who has read even a bit of SF can easily determine the exact ways in which that situation is very, very wrong. And it does have a bit of a Twilight Zone feel in the way it’s currently going wrong.

But part of the SFnal element – and all of the fairy tale elements – are carried in the paws of the mice. Not just Anny’s mice, but the mice she finds at Harbor, hidden in the walls, powering the infrastructure and perfectly capable of setting that infrastructure on fire. Which they do, because Anny, in her own way, is one of them.

How Anny becomes one of them, whether her own mice or real or imaginary constructs or imaginary wrapping for something else real is never fully explained and doesn’t have to be. Because we’re Team Anny every step of the way, and if Anny needs to pretend to be Anny Mouse or become Anny Mouse or just be ANNYMOUSE (anonymous), that’s just fine with us as long as some version of Anny brings down Harbor and gets to take herself and her people HOME.

A- #BookReview: The Summer War by Naomi Novik

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: The Summer War by Naomi NovikThe Summer War by Naomi Novik
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fairy tales, fantasy, retellings
Pages: 144
Published by Del Rey on September 16, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In this poignant, heartfelt novella from the New York Times bestselling author of Spinning Silver and the Scholomance Trilogy, a young witch who has inadvertently cursed her brother to live a life without love must find a way to undo her spell.
Celia discovered her talent for magic on the day her beloved oldest brother Argent left home. Furious at him for abandoning her in a war-torn land, she lashed out, not realizing her childish, angry words would suddenly become imbued with the power of prophecy, dooming him to a life without love.
While Argent wanders the world, forced to seek only fame and glory instead of the love and belonging he truly desires, Celia attempts to undo the curse she placed on him. Yet even as she grows from a girl to a woman, she cannot find the solution—until she learns the truth about the centuries-old war between her own people and the summerlings, the immortal beings who hold a relentless grudge against their mortal neighbors.
Now, with the aid of her unwanted middle brother, Celia may be able to both undo her eldest brother's curse and heal the lands so long torn apart by the Summer War.

My Review:

“Back in the days when wishes still held power,” there was a human kingdom bordering the lands belonging to the Fae. In other words, this is a fairy tale. But not nearly as much like the fairy tales we all grew up on.

Because this isn’t a story to entertain children, it’s a story about one particular child, twelve-year-old Lady Celia, and her rather abrupt coming of age.

Celia comes of age, and comes into her power, at the ripe ‘old’ age of twelve, when her dearly beloved oldest brother, Argent, casts aside his inheritance and his family in one very fell swoop because he can no longer live under his father’s dominion.

Because Argent is gay and their father isn’t having THAT sort of behavior in his successor. Or that’s how it appears to Argent. To Celia, it appears that all of her beloved brother’s protestations that he’d always love her and always take care of her were bald-faced lies.

The only reason that she knew he was leaving was because she waited up for him and confronted him about it. He KNOWS he can’t stay, because he has witnessed first-hand how his father punishes men just like him – and he can’t live that lie.

But Celia is too young, perhaps, for that explanation. All she sees and feels is heartbreak, grief, and the loss of the person she held most dear in the whole world. And her wishes do have power.

Magical power.

In that spasm of grief and angst and betrayal, Celia curses her beloved brother to never be able to love or be loved by anyone ever again. It’s the kind of thing children say when they’re thwarted, and Celia is still a child.

But technically, she has just come into her womanhood, and magic is all about the fine print and the technicalities. She has power, and she has just used it to wound someone she dearly loves.

She spends the next three years trying to find Argent and take back the curse, but to no avail. Only for an entirely different betrayal to bring them face-to-face once more, on the eve of what could be both of their deaths.

And the kingdom along with them. Or, perhaps, two.

Escape Rating A-: The Summer War is a bit of a fractured fairy tale, much like two of the author’s previous books, Uprooted and Spinning Silver. Also, like both of those stories, the fairy tale – or more likely an amalgam of fairy tales and fairy tale tropes – any single origin story isn’t all that obvious – and may not exist at all.

Which honestly doesn’t matter, because this is one of those stories where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – which is especially true because its story and its lessons are packed into the length of a novella.

And it’s perfect at that length, because there are details in the story that don’t bear close examination, although the thing as a whole is beautiful in the tale it tells AND its compactness.

What makes this so much fun to read is that, while it very much reads like a fairy tale – it’s exactly the kind of fairy tale we didn’t read as children. Instead, very much like T. Kingfisher’s imagined and reimagined fairy tale-type stories, Hemlock & Silver, Nettle & Bone and especially in this case Thornhedge, The Summer War is a story where the ‘princess’ (she isn’t technically, and that does matter in the end), not only isn’t waiting around to be rescued but has brains and real agency. Celia is the prime mover and shaker of the story even as she herself is moved and shook.

While the story here reminds me of Thornhedge, Celia as a character reminds me a lot of Snow in Hemlock & Silver. Both girls are twelve, and their actions are petulant and angry and hurt but then they are ONLY TWELVE and it’s a sheltered twelve at that. The difference – and it’s important to the story – is that the time period covered by Hemlock is short so that Snow is still twelve at the end and in over her head the whole time. Although she finally does use her head in the end.

In this story, Celia starts turning into Anja the healer pretty damn fast. Not exactly, but she starts maturing at perhaps a more rapid pace than seems likely. OTOH, her circumstances push her hard. She grows up fast because there is suddenly no adult to adult for her and she has no choice but to take up the reins herself. So she does.

With the help of her formerly disregarded and disparaged middle brother Roric. And it’s the making of both of them in more ways than one. The sibling relationships in this story are lovely, even when they hurt.

But the beating and broken heart of this story is all in the title. It’s right there. It’s about the war between the fae, the people of the Summerlands, and the humans. And even though the reasons for the war, the reasons the fae attack the humans and their methods of doing so, are all seemingly covered in the glamor of faerie, the story is about forcing both kingdoms to recognize their real motivations and the true cost of war. Because NEITHER king is willing to look into their own motivations. At least not until Celia screws THEIR supposed courage – along with her own father’s – to HER sticking point.

The fae king values his theoretical honor and his bloody vengeance over the welfare of his kingdom. And the human king lies, cheats, steals and betrays his own people just to keep his political rivals focused on the fae so that he can keep his throne. It’s Celia, trapped in a tower and the pawn of both kingdoms, who still manages to pull aside the glamor they are both using to cover their own actions and misdeeds – and shows the rot underneath the so-called glory to the people of both courts.

So it’s Celia, with her “wish that had power,” who brings all the forces together, the fae king, her own father, her brothers, the fae court and the people on both sides who have been sacrificed for their kings’ pride, and into a focus as sharp as any sword, so that The Summer War, the war that never truly ended, can finally, peacefully and above all TRULY, come to an end.

(The phrase “Back in the days when wishes still held power,” is from Alison Saft’s A Dark and Drowning Tide, which is a marvelous and thought-provoking fantasy but not a readalike for The Summer War. But the quote fits SO well I couldn’t resist.)

If you love fractured fairy tales, or stories in that style, especially those where agency resides in the most needed and merely the most usual people and places, or if you loved this author’s fairy tale stories Uprooted and Spinning Silver, or T. Kingfisher’s, or Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots, you’re going to love The Summer War.

A+ #AudioBookReview: Hemlock and Silver by T. Kingfisher

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #AudioBookReview: Hemlock and Silver by T. KingfisherHemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher
Narrator: Jennifer Pickens
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, fairy tales, fantasy, retellings
Pages: 368
Length: 11 hours and 50 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on August 19, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author T. Kingfisher comes Hemlock & Silver, a dark reimagining of “Snow White” steeped in poison, intrigue, and treason of the most magical kind.
Healer Anja regularly drinks poison.
Not to die, but to save— seeking cures for those everyone else has given up on.
But a summons from the King interrupts her quiet, herb-obsessed life. His daughter, Snow, is dying, and he hopes Anja’s unorthodox methods can save her.
Aided by a taciturn guard, a narcissistic cat, and a passion for the scientific method, Anja rushes to treat Snow, but nothing seems to work. That is, until she finds a secret world, hidden inside a magic mirror. This dark realm may hold the key to what is making Snow sick.
Or it might be the thing that kills them all.

My Review:

Snow. Glass. Apples. The images are iconic, aren’t they? Snow White. Mirror Glass. Poison Apples.

Howsomever, particularly considering that he was married to a woman who might as well be Maleficent, the King of this little fantasy kingdom is actually a rather decent – and somewhat nondescript – man. Also a desperate one. His 12-year-old daughter, Snow, seems to be dying by inches – and it’s not an easy or an easy death. None of the official court healers has a clue. That this seems to be an era when leeching and purging and OMG blistering the feet were the height of medical expertise, well, that’s not a surprise.

So he turns to a very unofficial healer, the spinster daughter of one of the kingdom’s prosperous merchants, a woman referred to as ‘Healer’ Anja. In Anja’s case, the title is a courtesy only, because she’s not really a healer and she’d be the first to admit that. But the church’s blessing on her work DOES keep the witch burnings away. At least so far.

Anja is more of a medical researcher than an actual healer. And the medicine that she has spent her life pretty much obsessed with is poison. Not exactly. (There’s a lot of not exactly and sorta/kinda and maybe and well, well uh, in the way Anja talks inside her head. The place from which this entire story is told – and told well if you like protagonists who are a bit too honest with themselves and frequently to their own detriment.)

The fact that some, many, possibly even most, poisons have no known cure is a problem that Anja has spent her life solving just a tiny corner of. She knows she’s not doing much, but solving the problem of poisons has consumed her life. Treating the patient attached to the problem isn’t her thing. At all. (She’s Gregory House only tactless rather than acidly cutting. She doesn’t want to emotionally wound the patients, but she just doesn’t know what to say to make the truth more palatable than it generally is.)

The king asks Anja to come to his daughter and figure out what’s the matter with the girl. Anja knows she’s being ordered to go, even if he never, ever uses those words, because he’s the king and he can do her father’s business untold damage, or simply have them all killed, if she refuses. This king isn’t like that – although he could be – and we get to experience all of Anja’s thoughts and fears on the subject as she agrees to go, caveat-ing all over the place that it might not be poison at all.

It is, and it isn’t. Just as there’s not exactly a poisoner – but there’s not exactly not one, either. Anja’s whole investigation runs headlong into a whole lot of people and things and situations that aren’t quite what they appear to be – but aren’t exactly not what they appear to be, either.

Because there’s an entire strange, fascinating and terrifying world that isn’t nearly so benign (and yes, that’s sarcasm) as what would in our world be Alice’s side of the looking glass. Filled with men, and monsters, and a queen who spent too long looking in the mirror and painted herself RED.

Escape Rating A+: This is surprisingly cozy for a fantasy about poisons. Then again, I’m not completely surprised because this is T. Kingfisher, and a LOT of her stories have quite a bit of cozy hidden inside. Like much of her work, it’s not cozy in any overt way, rather it’s cozy because she puts in a lot of cozy details about life in her created worlds, and it’s the kind of detail that feels cozy even when the events happening around those cozy details are very much NOT.

This story, like so much of her work, rides or dies on the back of – or rather in the head of – its first person protagonist, Anja. If you enjoy Anja’s voice – a voice that often feels like the voice of the author herself – you’re going to love this book. But if Anja’s constant second-guessing and self-deprecation and constant prevarication gets in the way of the story – for you – instead of BEING the story as it was for this reader, this may be more of a cup of chime adder venom than it is a delightful cup of tea.

(I listened to this one in audio, and the narrator, Jennifer Pickens, was just perfect for Anja. I loved the way that she was calm and reassuring, just the way that I thought Anja should sound, particularly when the person she was trying to reassure was herself.)

The thing about Anja, that I enjoy a lot about this author’s protagonists, is that the stuff she is gibbering inside her head is exactly the sort of thing that we all hope goes through our heads – and doesn’t spew out of our mouths too often – in the face of some of what she faces. And we all think we’re kinda weird and wonder why anyone puts up with us and all our faults are glaring and we’re never enough, etc., etc., etc. In other words, Anja has the same kind of impostor syndrome as the rest of us, so if you like seeing someone very real as a hero, she’s lovely. If you want your heroes to be heroic all the time, she’ll drive you bananas.

The story is also a lovely paean to the joys of scholarship and the delights of finding an answer to a question that has been plaguing you for ‘lo these many years’ that is terrific. Particularly if you’re female and have been told repeatedly and often that you’re too smart or like things that other people find inappropriate or distasteful for females but think is just fascinating when a male goes off on the exact same tangent.

I’ll get off the soapbox I borrowed from Anja and get back to things.

What made this story so much fun, for me, were the details of Anja’s life and her investigations and her desperation to solve the problem of Snow’s poisoning. Not that she doesn’t want to save the child, but what spurs her is her love of discovery.

The world that she finally discovers behind the mirror – with the help of an obnoxious, egotistical, self-centered and entirely much too cattitude-filled CAT is every bit as thrilling and frightening as any hero could have wished makes everything both simpler and more complicated – as such discoveries do. She has a big piece of the puzzle – and so MANY more questions that need to be answered.

I have to admit that I was surprised at the way the mirror world worked, because a fairy tale reimaging is absolutely NOT the place I expect to find the Star Trek “Mirror Universe”, but it’s here anyway. Not exactly, but close enough, right down to the description of the characters as “aggressive, mistrustful and opportunistic” – which describes the Mirror Queen to a “T”. Or perhaps that should be an “A”, as in apple, and we’re back where we started from.

In the end, this story is terrific, and it would be even better if it weren’t a reimagining of Snow White. But it is and that makes it all the more delicious, as this is a Snow White who in the end, gets her own damn revenge thankyouverymuch – with the help of a fairy god-cat, a gang of monstrous helpers who are pretty much the opposite of dwarves, and a female healer who solves the puzzle, saves the day and earns her very own happy ever after.

A+ #BookReview: Greenteeth by Molly O’Neill

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Greenteeth by Molly O’NeillGreenteeth by Molly O'Neill
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, fairy tales, fantasy, historical fantasy, retellings
Pages: 304
Published by Orbit on February 25, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Beneath the still surface of a lake lurks a monster with needle-sharp teeth. Hungry and ready to pounce. Jenny Greenteeth has never spoken to a human before, but when a witch is thrown into her lake, something makes Jenny decide she’s worth saving.
Temperance doesn’t know why her village has suddenly turned against her, only that it has something to do with the malevolent new pastor. Though they have nothing in common, these two must band together on a magical quest to defeat the evil that threatens Jenny’s lake and Temperance’s family – as well as the very soul of Britain.

My Review:

This is a book that I came into with no idea of what I was getting into. I had the blurb but that wasn’t much – or rather I didn’t glean all that much from it. Going in, I knew a whole lot more about the witch, Temperance, than I did about the titular narrator, Jenny Greenteeth. That this is the author’s OMG fantastically excellent and totally wonderful DEBUT meant that there wasn’t much in the way of previous work to look at, either.

But I was captivated from the very first page, when we meet Jenny Greenteeth under the lake near the tiny village of Chipping Appleby – and Jenny meets the witch Temperance Crump after she finds the woman weighted down with chains UNDER Jenny’s lake. From Jenny’s perspective, Temperance has obviously been accused of witchcraft. Equally obvious, the accusation is correct as Temperance is trying desperately to hang on to the air bubble she’s conjured so that she can survive this ordeal.

Little do both Jenny and Temperance know that their ordeal has barely begun.

Jenny rescues the witch – because she really doesn’t want witch corpses – or honestly ANY corpses – littering her pristine lake. AND because she’s lonely. Especially because she’s lonely even if she can’t quite let herself admit it.

Temperance allows herself to be rescued – because she’s panicked and desperate and seemingly doesn’t have much of a choice. But even in her panic and desperation – she does. She could let her fear override what little sense anyone would have while drowning at the bottom of a lake after the epic betrayal by everyone in her village. Or she could trust in the one being who is trying to help her – in spite of Jenny’s truly frightening appearance.

Considering that Temperance has just been condemned to death by a group of people just like her who have known her all of all of their lives, trusting in the kindness of a stranger who is really, truly strange is a hell of a leap of faith.

But she does reach out and Jenny reaches back and together they reach forward to someone who can help them take down a much, much bigger problem than either of them ever imagined.

So Temperance the witch and Jenny Greenteeth bargain with the goblin Brackus Marsh and together they form an unlikely ‘fellowship’ indeed. A fellowship that, just like the more famous such company in a much bigger story, goes on a magical quest to banish a great evil by taking a walk through some very dark places indeed.

That, in the end, they discover an even greater magic that elevates their quest and their story into a legend that is even more magical than they – and the reader – ever imagined.

Escape Rating A+: Greenteeth turned out to be an absolute delight of a historical fantasy, mixing a bit of myth and a bit of magic into a lovely story of found friendship and sisterhood.

At first it combines the relatively minor myths of the Jenny Greenteeths and other such creatures with the true but terrible history of the persecution of women who refused to stay in the place society had decreed for them through false accusations of witchcraft.

And I honestly thought the story was going to be about that juxtaposition – about the magic of the world, magic like the Jennies and the Fae Courts – going out of the world in the face of increased population and rational thinking while at the same time false accusations of witchcraft were being thrown around willy-nilly.

Then the story started developing layers – and I started recognizing the layers that had been there from the beginning.

I was barely familiar with Jenny Greenteeth – and mostly from T. Kingfisher’s excellent Thornhedge. But there are Jennies underneath a lot of fantasy if you can catch them out of the corner of your eye – like the grindylows in Harry Potter and the ‘Red Jennies’ in Dragon Age as well as more than few actual Jennies keeping an eye on some of Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children. There are also Jenny-like creatures in many, many mythologies around the world. Stick your face in any pond, anywhere, and there’s probably a Jenny lurking somewhere under the reeds.

So Greenteeth turned into a story about sisterhood and found family among the unlikeliest creatures, a story about the magic going away, and a story about a woman reclaiming her life, her village and her family with the help of some very unusual friends.

And then it went down into the dark of a dangerous magical quest, the last gasp of powers that are fading fast and set them and itself against an evil that plans to swallow the world. Then it went to a place out of a bigger and brighter legend entirely and I was left gasping at the end in awe and relief.

If Thornhedge and Spear by Nicola Griffith had a book baby it would be Greenteeth – and I wasn’t expecting that combination AT ALL. But it was utterly, fantastically, wondrous and I adored every page of it. I hope you will too.

That this is the author’s DEBUT novel is completely amazeballs. I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next, because whatever it is, I feel like I’m already ready to set out on the journey.

A- #AudioBookReview: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: The River Has Roots by Amal El-MohtarThe River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
Narrator: Gem Carmella
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fairy tales, fantasy, fantasy romance, retellings
Pages: 130
Length: 3 hours and 53 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tordotcom on March 4, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Follow the river Liss to the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, and meet two sisters who cannot be separated, even in death.
“Oh what is stronger than a death? Two sisters singing with one breath.”
In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family.
There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family’s latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees.
But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters’ bond but also their lives will be at risk…

My Review:

Thistleford lies just on the borders of Faerie – or Arcadia as it is called in this beautiful, lyrical almost fairy tale. (It reads so much like a fairy tale, and it certainly turns out to be one, but I kept thinking it must be a retelling of something I just didn’t recognize – and maybe it is.)

Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn live on the banks of the River Liss, and their joy as well as their duty is to sing to the magical willows that thrive on the banks of the river. It’s a task, and a delight, that has been handed down through the Hawthorn family for generations. Not just the singing, but also the care, maintenance and very careful harvesting of the willows and all the magical things they produce.

Because there is still magic in this world, even as ‘modernity’ encroaches, and the willows that the Hawthorn family tends produce the best magic-infused wood for working this world’s magic. A magic that is based on language, on the conjugation of words, and the transition of forms from the word “grammar” into “grimoire” – and back again.

Which is where the story of the Hawthorn sisters turns from love to tragedy and back again. Esther, the older sister, has fallen in love, not just with the Fae lands of Arcadia that border their own, but with one of the Arcadians, the wrath of the storm that calls themself Rin even as they refer to Esther as ‘Beloved’.

But Ysabel longs to remain with hearth and home, and resents the parting that she knows will come. She wants Esther to marry the neighbor who continues to court her in spite of her rejection – because that’s the future she wants for herself.

Instead, they find themselves thrust into the middle of exactly the kind of ‘murder ballad’ that Ysabel always loved to sing, and it’s left to Esther to sacrifice even more than she already has to keep Ysabel from making the same terrible mistake.

If she can find a way to make the magic that saved her reach out to a woman who has always loved her sister but rejected the magic that drives her very soul.

Escape Rating A-: The audio narration of The River Has Roots, in the hands – and more importantly the voice – of Gem Carmella – is absolutely exquisite. Not that the story isn’t lovely, but the reading, and even more poignantly the singing, of the narrator puts this story over the top in more than one way. (That the background and transitional music in the narration was performed by the author and her own sister added an extra bit of loveliness to the entire endeavor.)

Most of those ways are very, very good. The music of the Hawthorn Sisters is an important part – sometimes THE most important part – of the story.

There were also, however, and very much on the other hand, points where she was voicing the villain of the piece and she was so damn good at portraying his slimy villainousness that I wanted to throw something – preferably at him. He was so vile, and portrayed so well in that vileness, that I wanted to wash that voice out of my ears.

It took me a while to figure out what bothered me SO MUCH about the villain – because it was done so beautifully well – is that he’s a particular kind of villain. He’s a broken stair villain. He’s toxic, Esther knows he’s toxic, the narrator handles voicing his toxicity so well that it’s screamingly obvious, but he’s the kind of villain that is embedded in the system and manipulates it to his advantage even as the people around him just claim that he’s socially awkward and Esther KNOWS she’ll be portrayed as a hysterical female or receive some other gendered dismissal as long as he continues to seem like he’s obeying social norms and just doing it badly when he’s really hiding his despicable intentions under a thin veneer of ‘polite behavior’ and what he’s really trying to do is box Esther in so that she has no choice but to submit.

I’m going to try real hard to get down off this soapbox, but I’ll admit that it’s giving me extreme difficulty. The whole thing disturbed me considerably more than intended – but it SO DID.

As is fitting for a fantasy where the magical system is based on language, I fell so, so hard for the gorgeous lyricality of this story. At the same time, I have to confess that I was one of the few people who just didn’t ‘get’ or ‘get into’ This Is How You Lose the Time War, so I came into The River Has Roots hoping that I would like it but not predisposed to do so. It was an experiment that this time paid off.

From the beginning, the story reminded me a LOT of The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed with its setting on the edge of a dangerous fae country and its rules about coming in and attempting to go back out. It also very much has the feel of a fairy tale, and if it turned out to be a reworking or retelling of an existing tale I wouldn’t be surprised. Additionally it held echoes of Sharyn McCrumb’s Appalachian-based Ballad series that begins with If Ever I Return Pretty Peggy-O, which, come to think of it, are also murder ballads.

All of which meant that I wasn’t expecting a happy ending and was VERY pleasantly surprised – as were the Hawthorn sisters – when one arrived anyway. I’ll certainly be back the next time the author publishes a solo endeavor!

A+ #BookReview: A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. KingfisherA Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, fairy tales, fantasy, horror, retellings
Pages: 336
Published by Tor Books on August 6, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A dark retelling of the Brothers Grimm's Goose Girl, rife with secrets, murder, and forbidden magic
Cordelia knows her mother is unusual. Their house doesn’t have any doors between rooms, and her mother doesn't allow Cordelia to have a single friend—unless you count Falada, her mother's beautiful white horse. The only time Cordelia feels truly free is on her daily rides with him. But more than simple eccentricity sets her mother apart. Other mothers don’t force their daughters to be silent and motionless for hours, sometimes days, on end. Other mothers aren’t sorcerers.
After a suspicious death in their small town, Cordelia’s mother insists they leave in the middle of the night, riding away on Falada’s sturdy back, leaving behind all Cordelia has ever known. They arrive at the remote country manor of a wealthy older man, the Squire, and his unwed sister, Hester. Cordelia’s mother intends to lure the Squire into marriage, and Cordelia knows this can only be bad news for the bumbling gentleman and his kind, intelligent sister.
Hester sees the way Cordelia shrinks away from her mother, how the young girl sits eerily still at dinner every night. Hester knows that to save her brother from bewitchment and to rescue the terrified Cordelia, she will have to face down a wicked witch of the worst kind.

My Review:

The name of that sorceress who comes to call on Hester Chatham and her brother the Squire is “DOOM!”.

That’s not what she was christened with – assuming she was christened at all. Or baptized or anything like that because she’s clearly evil. This evil has a name, and it’s Evangeline. She’s hoping to change that to Mrs. Squire, but in order to get her way she’ll have to get past the Squire’s sister, Hester.

Evil is sure that Hester will be a pushover – or she’ll simply push her over a balcony. After all, she’s done it before. She even does it right in front of Hester to one of Hester’s dearest friends.

But evil, as that saying goes, only triumphs when good men stand by and do nothing. Evil’s magic is such that most of the men, including the Squire, are quite literally standing by and doing nothing as she has utterly ensorcelled them – or at least the ones she thinks are important.

Seeing her friend die, watching her brother succumb to the sorceress’ seductive magic, discovering that the sorceress’ daughter is ANYTHING but her mother’s accomplice, spurs Hester to ACT. To do whatever she can and however she must in order to save her brother, her friends and even the sorceress’ desperate and despairing daughter.

All their lives hang in the teetering balance.

Escape Rating A+: This wasn’t what I expected, although having read quite a bit of the author’s work, I probably should have. I also had zero recollection of the fairy tale the story is loosely based on (The Goose Girl if you’re curious too), and that didn’t matter a bit, although if the idea of that drives you bonkers there’s a summary in Wikipedia, which some Wikipedian needs to edit to include this book in the list of adaptations.

Kingfisher writes both fantasy and horror and often in that mushy middle between the two. While this one is in that middle, it leans more to the fantasy side the way that the equally awesome (and award-winning!) Nettle and Bone did, rather than hewing closer to the horror side the way that her Sworn Soldier series (What Moves the Dead and What Feasts at Night) does.

Not that the acts that the sorceress commits are not plenty horrific – because they completely, utterly and absolutely are. But the way the story works its way out of her evil feels more like a fantasy. It also specifically feels a bit like a very specific fantasy, Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons by Quenby Olson. I’m certain that Hester and Miss Percy would be the very best of friends – and would have PLENTY of common ground to talk about!

I certainly enjoyed both stories for the same reason, their marvelous middle-aged female protagonists who take terrible matters into their own hands – after a bit of quite reasonable and reasoning reluctance – in order to get the best of the evil bitch attempting to put them down so they can save the day.

Which is when I felt like I got hit with a clue-by-four, to the point of chagrin that I didn’t figure out a whole bunch of things sooner. Not the way that Hester got the best of the sorceress, but rather the way that the story as a whole worked. And, as I mulled things over more than a bit, the way that Nettle and Bone and What Feasts at Night and a LOT of the author’s work, well, works.

The stories are feminist by example rather than by hitting the reader over the head with feminism. They simply show that women are beyond capable of doing all the things that men do, including being insufferably and thoughtlessly and selfishly and unironically evil

Meanwhile, the male characters serve in secondary roles. You know what I mean, the roles that women normally fill. In this story, and now that I think of it in much of the author’s work, women fill the big parts and do the big things, while men are the assistants, the helpmeets, the love interests, the dupes, and the fools. They’re sidekicks. And even, as in the case of Hester’s brother the Squire, they can be TSTL.

Which he absolutely is. He’s just lucky that Hester absolutely is not.

The icing on the cake of this story is that the Squire merely gets a lucky escape, while Hester is the one who deserved and certainly earned a glorious happy ever after.

Review: Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: Thornhedge by T. KingfisherThornhedge by T. Kingfisher
Narrator: Jennifer Blom
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, fairy tales, fantasy, retellings
Pages: 128
Length: 3 hours and 43 minutes
Published by Tor Books on August 15, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

From USA Today bestselling author T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge is an original, subversive fairytale about a kind-hearted, toad-shaped heroine, a gentle knight, and a mission gone completely sideways.
There’s a princess trapped in a tower. This isn't her story.
Meet Toadling. On the day of her birth, she was stolen from her family by the fairies, but she grew up safe and loved in the warm waters of faerieland. Once an adult though, the fae ask a favor of Toadling: return to the human world and offer a blessing of protection to a newborn child. Simple, right?
If only.
Centuries later, a knight approaches a towering wall of brambles, where the thorns are as thick as your arm and as sharp as swords. He’s heard there’s a curse here that needs breaking, but it’s a curse Toadling will do anything to uphold…

My Review:

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess who was cursed by an evil fairy godmother to prick her finger on a spinning wheel’s spindle and sleep for a century – along with everyone else who inhabits that castle. This isn’t that story. That’s the story that was made from this one, when the truth needed to be spindled in order to make the story fit a more conventional mold.

Because in all the stories, evil is supposed to be ugly and anyone beautiful must be good. Which is what makes it a story, because in truth, evil often wears a very pretty face – all the better to hide the rot within. But that’s not the way the story is supposed to go – so it didn’t.

The truth, or at least this version of the truth – is considerably different – as the truth generally is.

Toadling has watched seasons change and years pass beyond counting, guarding the thornhedge that surrounds the darkling woods that encase the decaying castle where the beautiful princess sleeps a troubled, enchanted sleep. Once upon a time, Toadling was human. Once upon a time, she might have been that princess.

Once upon a time, she made a terrible mistake that put her exactly where she is, standing guard, doing her sometimes human, sometimes toad-like best to perform her self-imposed duty of keeping the princess safe – and keeping everyone else safe from the princess.

Just as Toadling is almost, almost sure that all knowledge of the lost princess and the crumbling tower has slipping out of time and mind of the rest of the world, her sanctuary is invaded in the kindliest and most annoyingly frustrating – at least for Toadling – way possible. The knight Halim has a burning need to solve the mystery. If there’s a princess imprisoned in the crumbling castle, he’ll certainly rescue her – after all, he is a knight – if not either a very good or very successful one. But his primary motivation isn’t the princess, it’s solving the puzzle.

Which, in the end, he does. Just not the way that Toadling feared. Or even worse, hoped.

Escape Rating A: Thornhedge is a fractured fairy tale. In fact, Thornhedge and A Spindle Splintered are fractured versions of the same fairy tale, that of Sleeping Beauty. But they have been fractured along very different fault lines.

It’s because they start with different questions. A Spindle Splintered asked whether there were ways for Sleeping Beauty to escape her destiny, and what would happen if she tried, and then proceeded to play out those variations across the multiverse.

Thornhedge goes back to the beginning of the story and asks a fundamental question about why it was necessary for the princess to be ensconced in that castle so thoroughly in the first place. The answer to that question sets the fairy tale entirely on its head but also makes the story considerably more interesting.

Instead of a ‘fridged’ heroine who gets top billing but does nothing to earn it, we get a lovely story about friendship and duty and guilt and spending a lifetime making up for someone else’s mistakes and cleaning up after someone else’s messes and finally, finally participating in your own rescue.

Because this isn’t really the Sleeping Beauty story at all, but in a totally different way than Sleeping Beauty wasn’t actually Sleeping Beauty’s own story.

Instead it’s a story about friendship and guilt and learning to be – not who you are supposed to be, but who you really are. That the lesson turns out to be just as much for Halim the Knight as it is for Toadling the fairy is just the teeniest, tiny part of what makes Thornhedge such a lovely read.

Or in my case, reread. I read this for a Library Journal review a few months back, and loved it as I do all of T. Kingfisher’s work, but not quite as much as I did Nettle & Bone. Listening to it now brought all the best parts back – particularly the perspective of the princess turned Toadling in her frustration, her longing, and her utterly justified anger at everything that brought her to this pass. Including herself.

The way in which she rescues herself, and Halim, and finally gets the future she wants now and the home she wants later, was beautiful. As is Toadling, even if neither the reader nor Halim notice it at first. Because this is Toadling’s story, and she’s the heroine, and heroines are supposed to be beautiful. So she is, and so is her story.

Review: White Cat Black Dog by Kelly Link

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
Review: White Cat Black Dog by Kelly LinkWhite Cat, Black Dog: Stories by Kelly Link, Shaun Tan
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Genres: fairy tales, fantasy, horror, retellings, science fiction, short stories
Pages: 272
Published by Random House on March 28, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Seven ingeniously reinvented fairy tales that play out with astonishing consequences in the modern world, from one of today's finest short story writers--MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellow Kelly Link, bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Get in Trouble
Finding seeds of inspiration in the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers--characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose.
In "The White Cat's Divorce," an aging billionaire sends his three sons on a series of absurd goose chases to decide which will become his heir. In "The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear," a professor with a delicate health condition becomes stranded for days in an airport hotel after a conference, desperate to get home to her wife and young daughter, and in acute danger of being late for an appointment that cannot be missed. In "Skinder's Veil," a young man agrees to take over a remote house-sitting gig for a friend. But what should be a chance to focus on his long-avoided dissertation instead becomes a wildly unexpected journey, as the house seems to be a portal for otherworldly travelers--or perhaps a door into his own mysterious psyche.
Twisting and winding in astonishing ways, expertly blending realism and the speculative, witty, empathetic, and never predictable--these stories remind us once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the art of short fiction.

My Review:

Perhaps it’s a lingering fondness for the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, but I’ve always had a fondness for properly Fractured Fairy Tales. As the author of this collection has long been a writer I intended to read but never quite found the appropriate ‘Round Tuit’ for, this collection seemed like the perfect opportunity to indulge in a bit of cartoon nostalgia while discovering an author I’d heard of – often – but never actually read.

Also, there’s a cat in the title so I figured that I couldn’t possibly go wrong reading White Cat, Black Dog. And I did not.

There are only seven stories in this collection, each based on a different, but frequently familiar, fairy tale. As with all collections there are exceptions to the rules – but always interesting ones.

Of those seven stories, my favorite was the first – and titular story, “The White Cat’s Divorce”. I’m not at all familiar with the fairy tale it was based on, The White Cat, but this is one where I honestly didn’t care. It’s a story where the reader does guess what’s coming fairly early on, but it’s such a glorious delivery of just desserts that one doesn’t mind. Also, the concept of a clan of talking cats running a marijuana farm and dispensary is just too funny for words.

My next favorite story was “The Lady and the Fox”, based on Tam Lin, which I DO remember. It’s probably the story in this collection where the grimdark is on the lightest shade of darkness, as it’s a holiday story that leans into the warmth of the season and does result in at least the possibility of a happy ending. The romance at the heart of the story could go either way after the end, but by ending where it does it is possible for the reader’s mind to wrap the whole thing in the glow of its season.

The story that creeped me out the most was “The White Road”, based on The Musicians of Bremen, a fairy tale which rings only a faint bell. Its setup actually has a lot in common with Station Eleven, but it’s not a pandemic or lawless scavengers that come creeping for those who stray into the wrong places or in the wrong ways, but rather a road that comes for the dead but can be put off by really good – or even really hammy acting.

Several stories hit the middle of their road for me. “Prince Hat Underground” just went on too long. I loved the concept, even though it reminded me more of Orpheus and Eurydice than its intended fairy tale. Something about it just didn’t work for me, although many readers loved it. My feelings about “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear” were similar in that it also did not work for me.

“The Game of Smash and Recovery” was supposed to be a take-off of Hansel and Gretel and I just plain didn’t see it. It did remind me of a combination of Medusa Uploaded and In the Lives of Puppets, which made it a very weird place to be even though the fairy tale was fractured completely beyond recognition.

Last, but not least in either size or scope, is the final story in the collection, the story that includes the titular Black Dog, “Skinder’s Veil”. This story about a waystation for the denizens of fairy and the house-sitter substituting for an absentee owner who may or may not be Death and who may or may not be a dead-ringer (pardon the pun) for its protagonist had a fascinating premise as well as characters who told some equally fascinating stories. And who probably would feel right at home in Bill Willingham’s Fables. I liked the story a lot as I was reading it, but at the end it felt like something had either just slipped through my grasp, or that the entire point of the thing was in the implications it left behind.

Ultimately a fascinating conundrum but too puzzling to be a favorite. Which may very well sum up my thoughts about the collection as a whole – but I’m glad I read it just the same.

Escape Rating B: In any collection, there’s usually at least one story that doesn’t work for a particular reader, and that was certainly true for this reader. Howsomever, a sign of a good collection is that when one looks at reviews for it, that story or two that turned out to be not quite what the individual hoped are different for each reader.

And that’s certainly true with White Cat, Black Dog.

So, if you’ve been meaning to become acquainted with this author, or curious about the work of someone who won one of the MacArthur “Genius Grants”, White Cat, Black Dog is a great place to be introduced to Kelly Link and her eclectic tales that merge fantasy, SF, horror and the most classic of classic fairy tales into a twisty, spellbinding whole, this is a great way of going about it.

Review: The Scarlet Circus by Jane Yolen

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Scarlet Circus by Jane YolenThe Scarlet Circus by Jane Yolen, Brandon Sanderson
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: fairy tales, fantasy, fantasy romance, Romance, short stories
Pages: 256
Published by Tachyon Publications on February 14, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The Scarlet Circus, the fourth volume in Yolen’s award-winning short fiction series brings you passionate treasures and unexpected transformations. This bewitching assemblage, with an original introduction from Brandon Sanderson, is an ideal read for anyone who appreciates witty, compelling, and classic romantic fantasy.

A rakish fairy meets the real Juliet behind Shakespeare's famous tragedy. A jewelry artist travels to the past to meet a successful silver-smith. The addled crew of a ship at sea discovers a mysterious merman. More than one ignored princess finds her match in the most unlikely men.

From ecstasy to tragedy, with love blossoming shyly, love at first sight, and even love borne of practical necessity―beloved fantasist Jane Yolen’s newest collection celebrates romance in all its glory.

My Review:

This ended up being my Valentine’s Day review because, to paraphrase the author’s forward just a bit, while the stories contained within are not “Romances” with a capital R, each story does contain a romantic element – even if that element is not the center of the story and seldom results in anything like a happy ever after.

Then again, one does have to kiss a fair number of frogs – and a few outright toads – in order to find the person they’ve been looking for all along.

Many of the stories in this collection are twists on familiar themes – or at least they sound familiar upon reading. “San Soleil” is one of those. It sounds just like the kind of fairy tale we all used to read – with the same kind of sting in its tail about listening to warnings provided by witches and sorceresses. It starts as a love story but is also a bit of a ‘just desserts’ kind of story. Not that anyone is evil. A bit TSTL but not evil.

As the opening story in the collection, it certainly sets the tone for the many and varied ways that love can go off the rails.

I had a sneaking bit of admiration for “Dusty Loves” in the way it takes off on Romeo & Juliet. This is one where the ‘heroine’ really is Too Stupid To Live, and consequently doesn’t. Which is pretty much what happens in Romeo & Juliet which is, after all, a TRAGEDY and not a romance. That the teller of this particular version of the tale has their tongue very firmly in cheek as they relate it makes the whole thing work a bit better than it would on its own.

On that favorite other hand, in “Unicorn Tapestry” the heroine is really a heroine, and most definitely not TSTL. If you like stories where the underdog wins the day, then this one will be right up your reading alley. It certainly left me with a smile at the end.

My least favorite stories in the collection were “A Ghost of an Affair”, “The Sea Man” and “The Erotic Faerie”. “Ghost” because it had so much promise but ended a bit ‘meh’. I felt like I was set up for a better and happier ending than I got. “Sea Man” felt like it didn’t belong here, it gave me vibes of other, more horrific tales than fit in this collection. And “Erotic Faerie” was an interesting concept rather than an actual story, a concept I’ve seen done better in Kenneth Schneyer’s “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer” in his Anthems Outside Time collection.

Those initial stories were interesting and fun but didn’t quite touch my heart – although “Dusty Loves” certainly tickled my funny bone a bit. These next ones, however, got a bit closer to the heart of the matter – or at least my heart.

“Dark Seed, Dark Stone” takes the idea of a warrior’s child picking up their weapons to defend their king and country and changes that child from the usual son to a daughter who uses more smarts than skills to defend her homeland. This one isn’t so much a romance as it is a story about duty and purpose – and I liked it better for that. It’s more a romance in the older meaning of the word than the current commercial definition, and I liked it all the better for it.

“Memoirs of a Bottle Djinn” takes the usual Aladdin-type story and gives it a twist that’s been seen before – but does it well. In this case, the savvy but desperate discoverer of the bottle is wary about spending his wish foolishly and without thought. At the same time, as a slave he’s all too able to empathize with the djinn’s plight. So he makes a wish they can both live with, happily ever after.

“Peter in Wonderland” was a delightful surprise. It’s clearly a takeoff on Alice in Wonderland, but shows that the real Alice Liddell still travels to Wonderland even in adulthood, and gives her a fellow-adventurer on her trip that leads to a happy ever after a bit different from the one she experienced in real life.

As much as I enjoyed the above stories, my two favorite entries in this Scarlet Circus were wonderfully entertaining indeed.

“Dragonfield” was wonderful because all of its characters are so very flawed in such human ways, and yet they manage to pull each other up and together to defeat the all too real dragon that is terrorizing the town and achieve a happy ever after that neither of them expected or thought they could ever deserve. It’s a romance and an adventure wrapped into one shiny, magical ball of a story and it’s just lovely.

Last, but not least, because the Matter of Britain can never be least of anything, is “The Sword and the Stone”, a much different story than The Sword in the Stone that you may remember from either the novel by T.H. White (part of The Once and Future King), or the Disney movie or even the episode of the British TV series Merlin. For an inanimate object, Excalibur sure does manage to get around.

This version of the tale is told from Merlin’s point of view, and he’s getting pretty jaded at this point in his long life of meddling with Britain. Arthur himself is also a bit older in this version than the more traditional versions of the tale. While he’s trying his best, he’s clearly better, and happier, at some things than others. To the point where he’d much rather fight the wars than wrangle the peace that he needs to secure and maintain. Merlin cooks up the idea of the sword in the stone to give Arthur’s rule the final stamp of popularity and legitimacy it needs. Arthur thinks it’s all mummery, magic and cheating, which it most definitely is. Until it isn’t.

Which makes the ending just that bit more magical.

Escape Rating A-: Like most collections, the stories are a bit all over the map. I adored a couple, liked quite a few more, and a small number just missed the mark for me in one way or another – as the above descriptions show. But overall I’m very glad I picked this up, and enjoyed the ways that it played with romances of many types and stripes and definitions. That “love is all there is is all we know of love” doesn’t have to mean that all loves are exactly the same type.

The author has published three previous collections in a similar vein to this one, not necessarily romances but rather whole entire circuses of fractured and reinterpreted fairy tales like How to Fracture a Fairy Tale, The Midnight Circus and The Emerald Circus. I’m sure I’ll be visiting those circuses the next time I’m looking for familiar tales with just a bit of a twist in their tails.