Juniper & Thorn: A Novel

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A dark reimagining of a fairytale that tries to show the real impact living in a folktale might have on those who experience it. It's a retelling of The Juniper Tree - though a rather loose one, drawing on broader themes rather than necessarily any specifics, and filling gaps or making changes to suit the novel format. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This novel was a realistic (but horrible) example of how it can feel to live under the abuse from a parent. She was a child raised on magic and a fairytale codex and since this was a fairytale retelling, it seemed fitting.

Marlinchen spends her days divining secrets in exchange for rubles and trying to placate their tyrannical, xenophobic wizard father, who keeps his daughters sequestered from the outside world. Marlinchen begins to notice the cracks in the stories she's been told upon meeting Sevas, the ballet's ingenue.

That being said, it definitely earns the distinction of being quite unlike most other fairytale retellings, and that it attempts at several points a critique of the genre is definitely a plus. For those who like their fantasies heaped with indulgent servings of sordid, this is the perfect October read (if you’re planning on picking this up, I cannot implore you enough to look up the CWs and heed them). I greatly appreciated the way Reid carefully and accurately represents the effects of sexual trauma, particularly through Marlinchen’s intrusive thoughts and fixation on specific body parts, which tend to be hypersexual in nature. These nighttime escapades offer salvation, but when Marlinchen captures the attention of a ballet dancer just as lost and isolated, her visits to the outside world become less uncommon. If content warnings are used as a sort of classification system for books, rather than for the intended purpose of protecting vulnerable readers, then the net effect is only to further stigmatize these topics.

Don't come into this expecting another book like The Wolf and the Woodsman, even though it is set in the same world. While I like poetic writing, sometimes the author would make too many analogies when it wasn't really necessary, and it got me distracted from the story. The gothic genre has always been a tool in which to navigate the difficult to describe, utilizing themes such as cannibalism, isolation, incest, violence, and abuse in portraying otherness.CW for bulimia and sexual abuse mentioned in this review; there are a lot more potential triggers in the book. Since humanity began recording their stories, we’ve used fairytales to explore the darkness inside us and around us and explain that monsters can come from within as easily as they can stalk us through the woods.