I think having a slightly idealized version of events in finding Sevas and falling in love is necessary both because it gives the book the only hope it has to offer and because it would be unbelievably grim without that. Entangled between the rage and hunger of her father, and her own desires, Marlinchen is caught in a snare, and the cost of freedom may be far more monstrous than she ever imagined. It has just now come to my attention that this is a retelling of the Grimm fairytale The Juniper Tree, so the whole "reads like a fairytale" thing makes a lot of sense now. And the remaining quarter was a mish-mash of monsters, mayhem, and murder, except a couple of the men being murdered definitely deserved to die so we don't really care about them anyway. I don’t want to get spoilery, but Marlinchin has bulimia and severe body dysmorphia as a result of the trauma she faced and continues to face.

To simply say “Well, Marlinchen’s sisters are just mean and there’s no room to examine this possible aspect of their mutual experiences of abuse” feels very disappointing to me.The moments of awareness by Marlinchen of being in a story, and what that means for her, were particularly interesting, and if anything could have been developed further into something more concrete. We see flashbacks of that scene multiple times, and there follows a recurring theme of her imagining nipples - her own and other people's - being chopped off with garden clippers. The plot was completely vulgar at points and I put the book down several times, completely nauseated by the content. Because you have the fantastical and the mundane lying so close side by side, with the wizard and his family representing the "Old World" from before the city came, there is a constant disjoint between people and ideas moving between the house and the rest of the world.

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. This book was a win in so many ways for me, and I feel as though I’ve found a kindred soul in Reid’s storytelling. They're like traumatised rabbits that only know to couple whenever they're in the vicinity of each other, with little in the way of building up a relationship, and you end up wondering what exactly the story is here. As for Sevas, I wished the author showed more of this character, his life outside Marlinchen's world, his past, his feelings and motivations.Don't come into this expecting another book like The Wolf and the Woodsman, even though it is set in the same world. Even though this is an adult book, Marlinchen looks like the typical YA fantasy MC: too naive, too innocent, too trustful, always saying she's sooo ugly but ending up paired together with the most beautiful boy in the city (seriously, this is so YA). We follow Marlinchen, youngest of three daughters of the last wizard in Oblya, a city sprung up from the steppe, obliterating the magic that lingered there before. It would have been nice to have a little of his own experience of himself or his people, as a brief glimmer of contrast against all the bigotry.

I won’t get into a long list of trigger warnings on this book because as a horror novel, it’s safe to assume there will be potentially triggering content. She was a child raised on magic and a fairytale codex and since this was a fairytale retelling, it seemed fitting. While you could clearly see where the author pulled inspiration from The Juniper Tree, it is by no means a retelling, just inspired by at best. 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.Undine (Marlinchen's older sister) was always despicted as beautiful and mean, Rose (the middle sister) was always clever and cold/distant, Marlinchen's father was mean and cruel, and Sevas (which I liked a lot, despite his lack of character development) was reduced as being beautiful and enamored by Marlinchen. Reid leans into Hungarian and Jewish folklore to tell the story of a third daughter trapped in a meagre life by her cursed, tyrannical father, a xenophobic wizard. As Marlinchen’s late night escapes grow more frequent, spurred by her lust from a local ballet performer, the stakes grow higher.