Nettle & Bone

This fantasy has fairytale resonances, although it doesn’t follow a specific tale as far as I can tell. It was an easy enough read, but also easy to put down without feeling the need to continue. The story’s told in third person, past tense from Marra’s viewpoint. Sometimes, like her, I found myself wondering what I was doing there.

Given that Marra was supposed to be 30, she seemed far younger. I could accept some amount of unworldliness after half her life in a convent, but she struck me as more slow on the uptake than that. (It didn’t help that a lot of her internal thoughts stated or restated what had already explicitly obvious).

The book starts with a dark tone, then evolves into something else. It’s mainly… a road trip with a handful of contrasting characters. Mood varied and felt inconsistent. I felt the story couldn’t decide whether it was a fairytale or a buddy adventure with snark, bickering and banter. (Fair enough, I occasionally chuckled at the interactions). If it was more of a fairytale, I could probably overlook odd logic (like Marra at the age of 30 becoming replacement wife in order to provide a much-needed heir?) but as it was, the random-seeming plot drivers put me off.

I read this thinking I hadn’t previously read anything by the author. But on coming to write this review, I notice I read A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking last year and also The Seventh Bride the year before that. My thoughts for those two books were similar to here. A protagonist who acts younger than we’d expect, who follows the plot rather than moving it, and a story without many “Ah! So that’s how it all comes together!” moments. As before, this would maybe appeal to younger readers than myself.

It's not my favorite T. Kingfisher book, but it one that I'm very fond of. And I love the curse child - that one I use in my TTRPG games.

I really enjoyed this fantasy slash fairy tale quest story about a youngest daughter working to try to free her elder sister from abuse. It has fresh worldbuilding, many characters with depth, multiple older women characters, and ultimately a story about working together to free people from powerful and abusive men.

I think the weakest part of the book was the romance angle for me. It was cute, but I felt like I was missing some extra characterization about "why these two" other than just romance-through-proximity. This was all a bit of a surprise for me, as I quite enjoyed the various T. Kingfisher sad paladin romances. (One could make a good argument that Fenris may as well also be yet another sad paladin, which doesn't help here either.)

That said, I feel like the romance was an exceptionally small part of the book (arguably much smaller than other books in the same genre of story) and so don't let that put you off. I just feel like the story would have been more powerful had there not been as much understated flirting there and they had just been buddies working together to right wrongs (or even some explicit aro or ace angle, which is how I had been reading Marra the rest of the book).

I wouldn't describe this as a comedy book, but there were so many funny moments to the book that I had to hold myself back from posting a dozen quotes. I laughed so hard at the dust-wife's exasperation leading into her third impossible task (and it was such good characterization too). Overall, this was a lot of fun but I also found it to have quite a bit more depth than I was expecting.

At this point I know what I'm getting into every time I open up a T. Kingfisher book, whether it's horror, fantasy or romance - and most of her books have all three, mixed at different distillations. The writing will be breezy, the plot will both be interesting and turn in directions that you wouldn't expect, the characterizations will be unique and not standard cardboard cutouts (well, her male love interests tend to be big noble depressed guys, but they're all well written). "Nettle & Bone" hits all of these - a fun read that conceals depth and absolutely wrenching moments. My only complaint is that I wish it didn't move so fast - that there was a bit more room to breathe. But across the board I'm always so excited to read new stuff from her. Every book so far has been great, and I feel like she's closing in on masterpieces.