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Nettle and Bone, by T. Kingfisher
Apr. 15th, 2023 10:52 amAnother of Ursula Vernon's fairy tale books under the pen name T Kingfisher, though this one is not inspired by a specific fairy tale, and is more a novel told in a fairy-tale-ish mode.
And it's very good at being a dark fairy tale, with the sense of the power of magic underlying everything, and the deadly sort of fairness/unfairness of the world. I loved it.
Vernon's prototypical protagonist type is a person who meets a horrible situation and responds with: "well, there's a thing that needs doing and I don't want to do it, but nobody else is going to, so I guess I'm going to figure it out." And this protagonist type is extremely soothing to me. I will read these characters of Vernon's endlessly.
I will say that I don't think that the merging of the two timelines of the story is done as smoothly as I'd like. The book opens in medias res in a dramatic episode, and then we go back in time to where the story starts, jumping back and forth between the two timelines until the backstory catches up with where the story began. The jumping back and forth part worked fine, and the linear narrative afterward worked fine, but the joining between the two was honestly pretty confusingly handled to me and I had to work at it to follow what had just happened with the timeline!
But that is absolutely my only complaint about the book and everything else is just SO great. It's the story of a princess named Marra who's pleased to be relegated to live in a nunnery because she's just not good at the whole politics thing and finds fibre arts much more interesting, but when the knowledge of something truly horrible occurring is thrust upon her, she goes on a quest to get the thing dealt with. On the way she collects various allies and travelling partners, every single one of whom I adore as well.
( cut for spoilers )
And it's very good at being a dark fairy tale, with the sense of the power of magic underlying everything, and the deadly sort of fairness/unfairness of the world. I loved it.
Vernon's prototypical protagonist type is a person who meets a horrible situation and responds with: "well, there's a thing that needs doing and I don't want to do it, but nobody else is going to, so I guess I'm going to figure it out." And this protagonist type is extremely soothing to me. I will read these characters of Vernon's endlessly.
I will say that I don't think that the merging of the two timelines of the story is done as smoothly as I'd like. The book opens in medias res in a dramatic episode, and then we go back in time to where the story starts, jumping back and forth between the two timelines until the backstory catches up with where the story began. The jumping back and forth part worked fine, and the linear narrative afterward worked fine, but the joining between the two was honestly pretty confusingly handled to me and I had to work at it to follow what had just happened with the timeline!
But that is absolutely my only complaint about the book and everything else is just SO great. It's the story of a princess named Marra who's pleased to be relegated to live in a nunnery because she's just not good at the whole politics thing and finds fibre arts much more interesting, but when the knowledge of something truly horrible occurring is thrust upon her, she goes on a quest to get the thing dealt with. On the way she collects various allies and travelling partners, every single one of whom I adore as well.
( cut for spoilers )
