Charlotte Kersten

Ava Reid is a fantasy author who started publishing in 2021 and has since published four books,  reaching huge audiences with TikTok virality and acquiring a reputation for writing dark, Gothic, atmospheric fantasy that focuses strongly on feminism and the stories of women who are trauma survivors. There are all things I adore in books and I’ve loved the sound of almost all of Reid’s premises, but I have nevertheless walked away from each reading experience deeply frustrated and dissatisfied. I want to talk about why today in my favorite format: an excessively long internet essay!

A couple of caveats before I do so: first, as I said, Reid’s protagonists are all trauma survivors, and I want to be perfectly clear that different depictions are going to resonate for different people. It is very apparent that others have found meaning in Reid’s depictions of feminism and trauma and healing, and this piece is in no way meant to take away from whatever these books mean to others. This is a topic that I am very passionate about and spend a lot of time working on and thinking about, and my goal is to share my thoughts about what works and doesn’t work for me, personally, in these books. Reid has also spoken about their experiences as a survivor and someone who struggles with mental health informing their writing, and I ask that any conversations stemming from this piece respect those lived experiences and focus on their creative works alone. It is fine to have criticisms of someone’s artistic choices and depictions, which is what I am doing, but I won’t tolerate any judgment extending to Reid’s own experiences. I want to clarify that Reid’s pronouns are she/they, so I will use both here, and the essay will feature spoilers for all her books.

What I Like

At the most fundamental level, there is a very strong sense of each protagonist’s perspective as someone who is struggling deeply, suffocating in her own mind, and filtering the world through that struggle. I was once a girl who was very scared and unstable, and at that essential level, I do believe these characters as girls who are very scared and unstable. 

I also actually like some of the things that I’ve specifically seen the books criticized for. For example, I often see complaints that the main characters are “annoying” or “difficult,” especially with regards to Effy in A Study in Drowning and Évike in The Wolf and the Woodsman. There’s been some criticism of the fact that Reid’s sexual assault survivors have a sense of sexual agency; for example, the fact that Marlinchen in Juniper & Thorn masturbates or that, after being raped for the first time, Roscille in Lady Macbeth has sex with her love interest. I like that these depictions go against the grain of how we typically view survivors. They normalize responses that women are often judged for –  for not being proper-passive-pure victims or having the “normal,” docile responses that we expect of them and are most tolerable for others. I think the fact that people are saying there’s something wrong with the characters for expressing their mental health struggles inconveniently or expressing their sexual agency says more about stigma and judgment than anything else, and it’s been very strange and interesting to see all of that unfold.

With all that in mind, my criticisms are not about whether Reid’s characters are likable or whether they are “realistic” survivors. I’m generally of the mindset that characters mainly just need to be well-drawn and interesting to spend time with, and that diverse trauma responses are all normal ways of dealing with the abnormal things that have happened to us. I’m more interested in the skill of Reid’s characterization and thematic work, as well as the implications of some of the writing choices she makes regarding trauma and feminism. 

  Agency and Trauma Recovery 

Most pressingly, I’ve thought a lot about Reid’s methods of character development and their depictions of agency and trauma recovery.  Each of her characters goes through an empowerment/trauma recovery arc to some extent, and this development often happens very quickly at the end of the book in a sudden, revelatory way that does not feel particularly resonant or satisfying. In addition, any incremental character growth or agency we see throughout often feels extremely muddled and confused. 

All of this is best shown in Lady Macbeth, which is a retelling that casts Lady Macbeth as a Roscille, a French teenager and unwilling bride to Macbeth. She has to use her intelligence to try to carve out her survival in the violent world of the patriarchy while generally following the beats of the original story. She is also notoriously beautiful and has to wear a veil because people believe that if men look into her eyes, they will go crazy and fall under her complete control. It turns out that this is actually true and she sometimes uses this power throughout the book, too, such as when she kills the king of Scotland at Macbeth’s command. 

One of the main things Roscille does throughout is attempt a variety of machinations/“plots” to gain power in her new home and avoid consummating her marriage. A lot of reviews have gone into depth about how incoherent and nonsensical her plans are, and I do agree with their points, but that is actually not my main concern. I am more interested in how she vacillates throughout the book between passivity and agency on different occasions. 

I think that this point, especially regarding her not using her magic to protect herself from men’s violence and control, could veer into the dangerous territory of  victim-blaming – “Well, why didn’t she just control or kill Macbeth? Why didn’t she just use her magic to stop him from X/Y/Z?” It is necessary to remember that Roscille is a young girl in an unwanted marriage and a strange land; there are of course massive psychological barriers that can prevent a victim/survivor from taking steps that feel obvious to those looking in from the outside.  

What complicates this, though, is that we DO see plenty of occasions where she is actively plotting and resisting and effectively using her magic to get men to do what she wants. And while it could absolutely make sense to show an abused character fluctuating in her ability to resist or feeling limited in what she can do due to the force of her oppression, the issue is that there is basically no internal consistency or psychological exploration regarding any of this in Lady Macbeth.

I was taking notes as I read, trying to understand what determines when Roscille acts and when she does not, and I ultimately feel that the story spends very little time thinking about the complexities therein, and it doesn’t even really feel that interested in doing so. At the end of the day, the results leave me feeling that her instances of passivity and agency are somewhat arbitrarily determined by what is necessary for the plot – killing the king, trying to assassinate Lisander so that the dynamic of their relationship changes, etc. There is no effective character work to show anything to the contrary in her state of mind or decision-making or development, and the result makes Roscille feel extremely vague and incoherent as a character; any exploration of resistance and female agency in traumatic situations ends up feeling befuddled at best. 

The other thing that convinces me that this is weak writing is that Roscille is lacking in internal consistency and depth in several other regards. She feels guilty about her actions on and off but seems to completely forget about some of the things she’s done – for example, when she is feeling guilty about being responsible for people’s deaths, she thinks about a stable boy who died because she kissed him and not the swathes of people who died in the campaign she just convinced Macbeth to wage against another clan. While he is gone on this raid, she starts panicking about whether or not he will die and what that will mean for her fate as war spoils, but in the scene where the war party returns and she is looking for him, she doesn’t think about this at all. At one point she tries to complete suicide by throwing herself off the castle roof and Lisander saves her, and then there is only a brief, passing mention of suicidality on one other occasion after that. The sum of all of this is very strange. 

Perhaps most disappointing to me is not even that we see these random oscillations and this lack of depth throughout, but that Roscille’s big Female Power Breakthrough happens literally at the 94% mark – I checked in my ebook! While imprisoned in Macbeth’s dungeon, she suddenly has this massive epiphany that she contains multitudes as a complex woman ❤ and her power cannot be constrained by the patriarchy. She knows exactly what to do to regain her freedom and escape; she quickly kills Macbeth and becomes Lisander’s queen. 

To be clear, I don’t think huge breakthroughs are impossible, but I also do not think they are the most narratively interesting option most of the time, nor the choice that will be most resonant for readers looking for character-driven narratives or grounded explorations of trauma. At least in my case, I value stories that show incremental growth and setbacks that are psychologically coherent instead of sudden Empowerment Climaxes that leave out how messy and interesting and gradual these things often are. 

The same general trajectory happens in A Study in Drowning. Effy struggles intensely throughout the book and her main vector of (limited) growth is her romance; when she realizes that the Fairy King is real and defeats him at the climax, this serves as the moment of major character growth, insight, and healing that leaves her a much healthier, happier person at the end. 

I said I’d mention examples of books I think succeed in each area I talk about, so I think The Pattern Scars by Caitlin Sweet does an extraordinary job of exploring a young woman’s experiences of  helplessness, despair, resistance, and battling for agency while she is magically bound to her abusive master’s control and his use of prophecy and necromancy. Everything I wished for in Roscille’s character arc is present here in what is an incredibly powerful and nuanced exploration of the protagonist’s struggles, motivations, and complex inner world as she tries to survive intense oppression and violence. Because I’ve read this book, I know it can be done and done very well. 

The trilogies following Fitzchivalry Farseer in Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings also explore its characters trauma, growth, and struggles excellently over decades of their lives. Hobb is known for characters who feel incredibly real in their inner worlds and how they respond to the vicissitudes of life, especially as characters like Fitz are controlled and powerless in many regards. 

Means of Empowerment

I already touched on this a bit, but I want to spend some time focusing specifically on the means by which the protagonists in these books primarily experience their empowerment and healing. Specifically, the male love interest is almost always the primary means of any positive growth, and he is usually the only significant character who is not horrible to the protagonist. If there are any relationships between female characters, they are usually minor or overwhelmingly negative throughout, and any female relationships intended to be positive or show feminist sisterhood only happen very rapidly at the end of  the book.  

Lisander, the half-English, half-Scottish dragon prince, is Roscille’s lover in Lady Macbeth, and he pretty much instantly starts giving her these feminist pep talks despite knowing that she murdered his father and tried to murder him too (?): “All your life you have been muzzled…so as not to disturb the architecture of the world…they may rob your body of its power, but they cannot take your mind.”

This is very consistent in their dynamic throughout, while every other man is violent, abusive and sexist.  There are inexplicably no other women in Macbeth’s castle (not an assumption on my part as a reader – this is directly stated in text!) until Roscille gets a servant to replace the one killed at the start. They bond at the very end of the book and Roscille fights to protect her, and Roscille joins her power with Macbeth’s witches/former wives who have been imprisoned so they can all break free.  

In a Study in Drowning, Effy specifically reflects that her relationship with Preston is what brings her strength and helps her heal, while every other man in the book assaults her, objectifies her, or commits some other kind of sexist/violent/patronizing act against her. At the very end, she frees a woman named Angharad from her control by the Fairy King and helps Angharad reclaim her voice as the true author of a beloved book. This was undoubtedly my favorite part of the story but again, it happened very briefly and rapidly at the end. 

In Juniper & Thorn, Marlinchen and her two sisters are entrapped and abused by their sorcerer father. They are forced to use their magic to make him money, rarely allowed to leave the house, and made to bend to his temper and whims. The sisters’ roles in the story never go beyond those of the nasty fairy tale sisters: to insult and patronize and bully Marlinchen, to show how much worse she is treated by their father, and to keep her excluded from their secret rebellions against him because they think she is stupid. One gets killed and the other begs Marlinchen for forgiveness at the end. Again, her secret romance with the ballet dancer Sevas is the primary means by which she starts to find her agency and push against the constraints that have been placed on her for so long. 

In the Wolf and the Woodsman, the main relationship with depth and growth is between Évike and the Woodsman/prince Gáspár, although some of Évike’s development also comes from her burgeoning relationship with her father. She has endured a lifetime of abuse from her adopted mother and has been the victim of vicious bullying by the other village girls. At the end of the book she joins up with the main bully, Katalin, to defeat the book’s villain. 

I hope it is clear that there is a pattern here…and I hope it is also clear how much more each of these stories could be doing. It is endlessly disappointing to me that each of these books, paying lip service to this goal of feminist empowerment for trauma survivors, focuses primarily on a woman’s romantic relationship with the One Good Man in the story to the detriment of actually, meaningfully, developing solidarity with other women or exploring the many other interesting, varied ways that empowerment and healing can happen. 
For a book that shows women gradually coming together against their collective abuse in a very powerful way, as well as exploring their individual trauma responses and means of survival/empowerment in depth, I recommend Naondel by Maria Turtshcaninoff.  

Feminism

I am also frustrated whenever I see these books described as ones that have a lot to say about the complexities of feminism and patriarchy, and they are described this way almost every time I hear something about them. I’ve already described my problems with the lack of character development throughout, the ineffectiveness of how agency is explored, the lack of complex female relationships, the focus on male love interests to the detriment of all else, and the propensity to have all male characters except that love interest be violent, misogynistic brutes. In addition to all of those problems tied to the books’ depiction of feminism, I am just not really sure what they truly have to say.

In each book we repeat the theme of men exploiting and disempowering women by stealing their magic and their voices, so a central idea is always regaining those. Through this comes the idea that men’s power is built upon taking away women’s by methods that are abusive to them, so feminist action and trauma healing must involve reclamation. That is fine as far as it goes, but I can’t help wanting more.
Beyond this central idea and the fact that each female protagonist struggles to believe in herself in the process, there are also number of explicit statements about the nature of men and masculinity being inherently violent and cruel and selfish and depraved, especially in Lady Macbeth:  “The nature of a man is not such that it can be undone entirely by simple affection…the king still had a man’s desires, his hungers, and his vices,” etc., etc. I’m not one to go around indignantly yelling #NotAllMen, by any means, but I do think that this is very basic and boring and I’m not particularly interested in the radfem notion of an inherently vile masculine nature, which these statements sometimes stray towards a bit instead of effectively demonstrating that the influences of patriarchal masculinity are damaging and widespread but not baked-in.  In any case, I’m looking for a lot more from an author who is regularly acclaimed for their feminist themes.

What’s also really annoying is that I can see exactly how each book could have easily been so much more!!! Lady Macbeth has gotten a lot of hate for turning the Ultimate Evil Girlboss Queen into a disempowered teenage girl struggling with abuse. I’m less bothered by this than most, I think; I don’t believe that it’s automatically anti-feminist to write a story about a disempowered woman/a woman who is raped/a woman who struggles in a patriarchal world (this IS an opinion I see regularly, and I talk about my thoughts regarding it in this essay) and I think reimaginings can be very different from their original inspirations. But I do think you have to actually do something interesting to pull this off, either by having something to say other than Patriarchy Bad or by exploring the complexities of survivorhood with a character who feels real and dynamic in some regard…or maybe both!

What’s especially wasted here, to me, is any exploration of the discrepancy between Shakespeare’s Lady and Reid’s – isn’t there the space for something really fascinating in Roscille being a terrified girl clawing for survival who, through gaining safety and agency, is then villainized in her legacy as a callous monster who controls her husband to gain power? How could you write a Lady Macbeth retelling with Reid’s premise and not explore that at all? I’m also baffled by how little thought there is surrounding Roscille’s magic and the messaging around it. The concept of a woman so beautiful she makes men go mad and fall into her power leads very clearly into an exploration of victim-blaming (you’re so beautiful, you make me crazy, look what you made me do) and the evergreen idea that women actually control men in the patriarchy via manipulating men’s desire and love for them. Once again, Lady Macbeth does not seem interested at all in exploring any of this in any meaningful way whatsoever, which is just deeply bizarre to me. 

The missed feminist opportunities in Juniper & Thorn also frustrate me. If the story had been focused more on Marlinchen’s relationship with her sisters, it could have spent time grappling with how control and abuse turn women against each other as they try to survive – yet this division ultimately perpetuates their powerlessness. If the sisters worked to come to terms with how they competed with and hurt one another as they struggled not to be hurt by their father, if they realized who the real monster was and that the only way to freedom was by joining together despite the complexities of their past, my feelings about this book would have been entirely different. 

As it is now, I will point to a few examples of books that I think explore this dynamic of complex sibling relationships under abuse more effectively: The Onion Girl by Charles de Lint hasn’t aged well in some regards but in this way I think it is still excellent, and while I have other criticisms regarding the depiction of feminism in The Once and Future Witches by Alix E Harrow, I did definitely like how it explored the three sisters coming together in this regard. This is only one minor element of Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, but I absolutely loved how it is depicted there, too. 

To return to the main idea of this section, Tehanu by Ursula Le Guin will forever be my recommendation for fantasy that explores trauma, patriarchy, power, and how to even begin to think about transforming any of this in ways that are awe-inspiring, profound, and deeply moving. 

Romances

The rest of this deviates a bit from exploring the central themes of trauma and empowerment and feminism, but I still have more to say!! First amongst these is the fact that I really, fundamentally, do not like how Reid writes their romances. Beyond what I mentioned about the centrality of the romances to growth that could be happening in much more interesting and meaningful ways, the relationships tend to develop very quickly, and there is often an element of enemies-to-lovers or rivals-to-lovers that just does not work for me. In A Study in Drowning and The Wolf and the Woodsman, the couples spend most of their books together, but they spend most of their time together arguing, and the transition to the “lovers” part is not very convincing. In Juniper & Thorn and Lady Macbeth, the couples’ interactions are very brief and limited but end up with intense love declarations anyways. 

My least favorite romance is probably between Effy and Preston in A Study in Drowning, which I talked about a lot in my review of that book. I said this:

For the first third of the book, Effy is just petty, spiteful and rude to Preston because he represents everything that she is being denied at college due to sexism and Preston just kind of…takes it. She also makes a number of prejudiced/stereotyped comments about him being part Argantian (from the country that her country is currently at war with). My problem with this, to be clear, is not just that it happens. I’m fine with a story where a character who has been through a lot lashes out at someone who it’s safe to lash out at. Where it fails to work for me, though, is the way that the relationship then rather awkwardly transitions from all the nasty, petty sniping to what is clearly supposed to be a deeply delicate, tender and respectful romance that is all about trauma sensitivity and support.

Effy apologizes to Preston eventually, but for me it feels like far too little, too late because the relationship has already inexplicably developed way past the rivals-to-lovers point without any of it being addressed. Also, his responses to her apologies are really bizarre and funny. She’s like “Uh, sorry that I was deeply unkind to you without knowing you at all and continuously stereotyped your identity in the most uncharitable way possible. I guess that was kind of awful of me.” And then he’s just like “No, babe, [One Direction voice] I wish you could see yourself the way that I see you. You were just challenging me intellectually (note: that is definitely not all she was doing lol) and also I know you’ve been stereotyped too as a girl at college.” That element of Effy’s own prejudice is never meaningfully unpacked, and while it could have been a great chance to look at how someone struggling with their own oppression can still judge and hurt others in similar ways (and may even do so because of how they are being hurt), it just doesn’t quite ever go there.

Another big problem for me is that Preston just seems so vague and lifeless – I never really felt a true sense of what made him distinct or complex or interesting as a character at all. He’s a cynic who loves talking about his academic theories and he is kind and respectful to Effy when literally every other man in the book is a lascivious slobbering monster. There is one scene where he tells Effy about his father’s death, and that’s pretty much the most significant spotlight moment that he gets throughout the book.

I think the issues I mentioned here thread together in the other books’ romances too: the love interests are often very vague and boring, primarily characterized by how taut and angular and broody they are and the fact that they are outcasts too; the books have no real interest in exploring the implications of the female characters treating their partners badly in any way; and the pacing is very quick, which leads to a lack of development and authenticity. 

When you combine all of this with what I’ve already mentioned regarding the male characters usually being the Only Good Men and the main method by which the protagonists are empowered, I think a lot of these issues essentially come down to the fact that Reid struggles to write M/F romances in stories focused on patriarchal violence while reconciling the real difficulties of doing so and the nuances of power and gender that make can make romances truly powerful – and healing – in these contexts. 

And I feel confident in saying that because I’ve read a lot of great romances that do just that! My go-to recommendations for this type of story that I’ve mentioned many times before are Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash by Tasha Suri, as well as almost anything by Juliet Marillier but particularly Heart’s Blood. For a non-fantasy recommendation, my favorite romance of all time might be The Raging Quiet by Sheryl Jordan, a forgotten gem of a historical YA book that is so incredibly beautiful and tender that I want to cry every time I think about it. 

PLOT?????

Having read all of Reid’s published books as of 2024, something else I feel the need to mention is that there is always something absolutely wild happening in her plots. I’m not someone who needs a tightly paced, tidy three act structure following the traditional hero’s journey by any means, but I do need what I’m reading to be interesting and make some kind of sense, which can be hit or miss in Reid’s work. There are strange choices in each book, but this element stood out most strongly to me in A Study in Drowning. Effy wins a contest to redesign a house and proceeds to never register the fact that her employer does not care at all that she is constantly leaving to do other things and making no progress on her work. This is ultimately because it is a strange entrapment scheme devised by the Fairy King to make Effy belong to him, and she defeats him in a single anticlimactic encounter by tricking him into looking into a shard of mirror. She thereby frees Angharad, who was hiding all throughout their stay at the house instead of enlisting outsiders to help her defeat the King or warning Effy about what was happening for Reasons. She and Preston decide to have sex and nap/spoon in the manor’s guest house while there is an extremely ominous man creeping around and threatening them in the main house and a massive storm is about to hit and wash away the roads, trapping them there. She also finds a very important letter written decades ago randomly lying under someone’s bed while she and Preston are poking around a stranger’s house……

Strange choices like these pop up throughout each book. Most of the The Wolf and the Woodsman is just a cycle of Évike and Gáspár having the exact same argument over and over and being attacked by mythological creatures in ways that brings them closer together while they are on a fetch quest that proves futile, and the villains frequently make bafflingly dumb choices. As others have previously mentioned, Roscille’s machinations in Lady Macbeth make very little sense, and the element of characters making inexplicable decisions and fluctuating in their characterization/motives in plot-contingent ways are by no means limited to her, either. While I love a vibes-heavy, plot-light book as much as the next person, whatever plot does exist still needs to stand up to a basic level of scrutiny. 

Prose 

This might be my most controversial opinion, because regardless of how thoroughly a review criticizes Reid’s books, there is almost always a grudging line or two dedicated to the fact that their prose is beautiful and the books are extremely atmospheric. This is as subjective as any of the other elements I’ve discussed so far, but I’m less inclined to praise Reid’s writing. I find it to be distractingly repetitive – not only with the blushing that happens almost incessantly, but with an overreliance on certain turns of phrase, pieces of imagery, and slightly off-kilter metaphors and similes in each book.  

Something that I hadn’t been able to put my finger on before re-reading for this essay is that her writing feels somewhat vague, opaque, and cloudy in a way that comes across as flat instead of impressionistic when combined with plots, themes, relationships and characters that I also find very lacking. I love poetic prose and lush atmospheres in my fantasy, and I have several recommendations for readers looking for those in combination with explorations of trauma and dark fairy tale-esque elements:

• Patricia McKillip, especially The Forgotten Beasts of Eld and Winter Rose
• Tanith Lee, especially White as Snow
• In the Night Garden by Catherynne Valente (which I think was a comp title for Juniper & Thorn)
• Deerskin by Robin McKinley
• Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan

Conclusion

As I said at the start, I completely understand why readers are drawn to Reid’s stories. I think it’s because I too am so drawn to her promise that I have thought so much about these books and find them so frustrating instead of dismissing them as I do with most of my reading disappointments. I hope I articulated what I find lacking in her delivery of these strong premises, and I hope some of the books I suggested prove to be good reading for anyone who has been disappointed as I have, or for fans who are looking to scratch the same itch.