Charlotte Kersten

Summary
A world-weary woman races against the clock to rescue the children of a wrathful tyrant from a dangerous, otherworldly forest.

At the northern edge of a land ruled by a monstrous, foreign tyrant lies the wild forest known as the Elmever. The villagers know better than to let their children go near—once someone goes in, they never come back out.

No one knows the strange and terrifying traps of the Elmever better than Veris Thorn, the only person to ever rescue a child from the forest many years ago. When the Tyrant’s two young children go missing, Veris is commanded to enter the forest once more and bring them home safe. If Veris fails, the Tyrant will kill her; if she remains in the forest for longer than a day, she will be trapped forevermore.

So Veris will travel deep into the Elmever to face traps, riddles, and monsters at the behest of another monster. One misstep will cost everything.

My Thoughts

The Year of Evil Forests continues!!!!!!!!!! This time, I had lots of fun with the breathless run-on prose, the evocatively described malevolent forest with its tricks and tests and bargains, and the sense of evil lurking both within the woods and without.

But there just isn’t quite *enough* to carry everything else I think it’s trying to do, and things unravel a bit at the end. To start with, our protagonist Veris, who has been a very distant, practical character throughout, suddenly reveals a large amount of tragic backstory in a tiny amount of page time, including her mother and father dying, sexual exploitation by soldiers as a child, and the death of her daughter.

What’s also a bit wonky is that she shares a memory that she knows is not her worst memory in a situation where she is aware that she has to share her worst memory in order to save everyone. She is then devastated by what happens because of her failure, and there’s no real exploration of why she did what she did. Then, at the very end of the story, she does decide to tell her real worst memory to the conqueror-dictator who has been depicted as a figure of one-dimensional evil throughout, and he is persuaded to spare her life because of it.

With all of these elements, I feel like some additional thoughts from Veris about her decision-making and some more robust character moments throughout could have made it a bit less strange, but as it stands in the text, it just all feels a bit sudden and awkward.

I see the bones of a story about the generational legacies of violence and loss and tyranny and the ways that children grow up too quickly into adults who are oppressors or survivors, but this was too short and action-packed for me to really feel like I was able to sink my teeth into any of that. It’s still definitely a very cool, interesting novella, and I definitely say that anyone else looking for Evil Forest books should add it to the list.