Charlotte Kersten

“No one had ever told me that I was allowed to scream.”

Year published: 2022

Categories: Adult, fantasy/horror, retelling (The Juniper Tree)

LGBTQIA representation: F/F, side character

Summary: A gruesome curse. A city in upheaval. A monster with unquenchable appetites.

Marlinchen and her two sisters live with their wizard father in a city shifting from magic to industry. As Oblya’s last true witches, she and her sisters are little more than a tourist trap as they treat their clients with archaic remedies and beguile them with nostalgic charm. Marlinchen spends her days divining secrets in exchange for rubles and trying to placate her tyrannical, xenophobic father, who keeps his daughters sequestered from the outside world. But at night, Marlinchen and her sisters sneak out to enjoy the city’s amenities and revel in its thrills, particularly the recently established ballet theater, where Marlinchen meets a dancer who quickly captures her heart.

As Marlinchen’s late-night trysts grow more fervent and frequent, so does the threat of her father’s rage and magic. And while Oblya flourishes with culture and bustles with enterprise, a monster lurks in its midst, borne of intolerance and resentment and suffused with old-world power. Caught between history and progress and blood and desire, Marlinchen must draw upon her own magic to keep her city safe and find her place within it.

What I Thought

I missed Reid’s debut The Wolf and the Woodsman a bit ago, but Juniper & Thorn sounded like such a good fit for me that I was delighted to get an ARC. Thanks to NetGalley for that!!! The first thing that I can say about this book is that I wanted to keep reading it very badly and ended up finishing it in a day. There was definitely something about it that drew me in all the way until the end – it has grit and atmosphere and personality in spades. I think a lot of this has to do with the writing style, which I generally found to be immersive and effective in creating a sense of a dreadful fairy tale with lots of interesting/charming little details, especially about the stories that Marlinchen loves. I do think it could have been cleaned up in places, however – I definitely noticed certain tics and repetitions and similes of dubious quality.

As a fairy tale retelling, I think this book generally does a good job of taking the roots of The Juniper Tree and transforming it into something interesting and new that still stays true to the bloody heart of the original (extremely grim and grisly) tale. All of the magical elements worked pretty well for me. However, it ended up being a weaker read for me in a couple of ways. This is especially true when it comes to how it remains true to fairy tale tropes with regard to Marlinchen’s love interest and sisters. Specifically, the love story progresses very rapidly and veers a bit too close to insta-love for my tastes and the sisters are frustratingly one-dimensional. Sevas, the ballet dancer who is Marlinchen’s love interest, only interacts with her a few times – they meet briefly in an alley, talk again briefly in her sister’s storeroom, have a date where they go to a tavern and the beach, and then they briefly see each other again while Marlinchen is trying to heal a customer – but they end up being more or less ride or die with passionate declarations of love for the rest of the book after these interactions. It didn’t quite work for me.

One of the biggest things that brings them together is both being survivors of abuse, and I think that’s always a really beautiful idea that I often enjoy seeing executed (The Mirror Season, Heart’s Blood and Empire of Sand are all examples of this that I’ve liked). In Juniper & Thorn there are a couple really powerful moments of them protecting and supporting each other, but my overall feeling (as with the romance in general) is just that I wish there could have been more of this because I think it could have gone a lot deeper.

As for Marlinchen’s sisters, their role in the story is essentially that of the nasty fairy tale sisters: to insult and patronize and bully her, to show how much worse Marlinchen is treated by their father, and to keep her excluded from their secret rebellions against him because they think she is stupid. There are a few other fantasy books I’ve read recently that explore siblings surviving in and after abusive situations, specifically The Once and Future Witches, Spinning Silver and the Onion Girl. I think these three books did a good job of showing how a family member’s abuse can destroy the relationships between siblings and turn them against each other as they hurt each other to protect themselves. Juniper & Thorn does this too.

But in the other books I mentioned, there was also room for growth and reconciliation, reckonings and the potential repair of terrible relationships between the siblings once their abuse ended – they acknowledged the things they had done to hurt each other and betray each other while they tried imperfectly to survive in situations that no children are equipped to survive in. They grappled with what it meant to have turned against each other, blamed each other and tried/or not tried to protect each other from the abuse. To simply say “Well, Marlinchen’s sisters are just mean and there’s no room to examine other aspects of their mutual experiences of abuse” feels disappointing to me.

A few other thoughts about what didn’t work for me – the father’s competition to get the sisters married and the ensuing portion of the book where there are just a bunch of random boys hanging around the house as murderbait felt somewhat clumsy to me. In addition, I know Reid herself stated that the book was intended to continue along in exploring The Wolf and the Woodsman’s theme of nation-building/empire/identity in an emerging industrial context this time, but I would personally say that this was mentioned only vaguely with the lightest of touches.

I’m updating this review a bit now that I’ve had some time for the book to settle -and seen some other reactions to it. A lot of negative reviews seem to feel that the book jam-packs in way too much graphic, upsetting content for a book of its size. One particular review (the top one on Goodreads) became subject of quite a lot of Discourse because it claimed that the book was oversexualized – that Marlinchen and Sevas have way too much sex, that sex is talked about too much and in a gross way. The first part of this is just strange to me because there is only one fairly mild sex scene. The second part is more subjective, of course, but I personally liked that the book was willing to be frank about really uncomfortable things – like, YEAH, it does suck to wake up from a sex dream of someone who hurt you!! And I get that that’s a super icky thing to read or think about but I also think depicting it can be really powerful for people who do experience it – or for someone who doesn’t experience it to think about what it might be like to deal with that. It’s something I wrote about in the Elf Books That Like 10 People Have Read To Conclusion and I personally appreciate that Reid is willing to go places like that. I also liked that Marlinchen had sexual agency beyond the way that she was abused. As for the matter of how Reid handled the dark content/if it was “too much,” overall, I get that everyone is going to feel differently about this – as I’ve made clear, my feeling was mainly that I wanted more depth and exploration of what was present.

I’ve already talked about the parts that didn’t work for me, but as I’ve touched on a bit already, my favorite part of Juniper & Thorn’s exploration of abuse was how messy and raw Marlinchen felt as a character. We see her fantasies of grotesque self-harm, her hatred of her body, the way she binges and purges to self-regulate, the self-effacement and doubt and crushing sense of powerlessness that she slowly fights off as she starts to take action for herself. This depiction definitely stayed with me and I still think about it sometimes even as I’m revising this review a year-ish later. Reid’s YA book A Study in Drowning is coming out later this year and I plan to read it – if I do so, maybe I won’t be posting the review a year later!