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. He's Jewish, so therefore she should view him as monstrous and greedy - the way she's been taught to view Jews.

If the author was trying to make a statement about the horrible nature of these things, picking one or two to include in her story would have had a much deeper and meaningful impact on the reader than throwing everything in. It's about all the ways an abuser exerts control over their victims in an effort to feel fulfilled in a way that will ultimately never be enough. And how the ending did nothing, in my eyes, to remedy that, which completely negated any growth she might have achieved over the course of the story. But at night, they sneak out to revel in the city's thrills, particularly the recently established ballet theatre, where Marlinchen meets a dancer who quickly captures her heart. Much of what it does could land, or could utterly fail for any given reader just based on their particular take on it, their background and their own experiences.As for Marlinchen’s sisters, their role in the story is essentially that of the nasty fairy tale sisters: to insult and patronize and bully her, to show how much worse Marlinchen is treated by their father, to keep her excluded from their secret rebellions against him because they think she is stupid. We don't see the story through his eyes - we are very securely rooted in Marlinchen's perspective - but even with only what he tells her, we see the cruelty and harshness of being who he is in the fairytale (and also not-fairytale) world.

Juniper and Thorn was a massively anticipated read for me, as Ava’s debut The Wolf and the Woodsman was a huge success last year, making its way into my top ten reads of 2021.

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. Ava Reid’s protagonists move about the world doing the best they can to protect themselves and their happiness. It's something I wrote about in the Elf Books That Like 10 People Have Read To Conclusion and I personally appreciate that Reid is willing to go places like that. Their sophomore novel is a Gothic horror, set in a city struck by the unstoppable wave of industrialisation.

One final note: I’ve never read The Juniper Tree so any love or distaste in that aspect of it is completely lost on me.The story was strange, weird and described ugly things in such a captivating way that i wanted to SEE them not experience them because i am coward and i get scared. I was incredibly excited to be able to continue to support them and read more of their work… and a fantasy-horror retelling of Grimm’s darkest fairytale? As the last true witches of Oblya, Marlinchen and her sisters, Rose and Undine, are trapped in the gripped of their overbearing wizard father. 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. My second issue: I am a reader for whom books tend to live or die by the strength of their characters, so it was an enormous problem for me that I couldn't quite get around to caring about Marlinchen, and still don't feel like I know her despite having read over 300 pages of her story.