Rather, Marlinchen isn’t a character that’s going to lead a rebellion or sacrifice themself for the greater good or take down a ruthless king.

More importantly, it has my sweet children, Marlinchen and Sevas, both of whom I would lay down my life for without question.thank you netgalley, avon and harper voyager, and ava reid for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! Marlinchen’s relationship with her sisters was messy, was awful, set them apart, showed what they all had to do to themselves and to each other to survive living under their father, regardless if that meant throwing someone else to their father’s rage. When I heard that Ava Reid had written a gothic horror retelling of The Juniper Tree, there was nothing I wouldn't do to read it at the soonest possible chance. We have penny presses and phrenology and day workers in factories alongside a wizard whose wife was turned into a bird and who has an old god satyr living in his garden.

Marlinchen is morally grey in the way in the way that navigating the world is inherently a gray experience, especially when you’re raised within such a limited scope of understanding, especially when you’re taught corrupt and bigoted perspectives, and especially when you’re living with trauma. One particular review (the top one on Goodreads) became subject of quite a lot of Discourse because it claimed that the book was oversexualized - that Marlinchen and Sevas have way too much sex, that sex is talked about too much and in a gross way. They’re important, as we live in a world where these things unfortunately happen and we shouldn’t have our heads in the sand.

But it isn't just him - Sevas is Yehuli, and his handler Derkach takes every opportunity to remind him that he is "only" a Yehuli boy pulled from the slums. Ava Reid was born in Manhattan and raised right across the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey, but currently lives in Palo Alto, California. In the end, that was sold to me as a dark take on the Grimms' "The Juniper Tree" turned out to be a Jack the Ripper copycat with an emphasis on the gore and the sex and grossness, neglecting the plot and the characterisation.

As the youngest of the family, she is treated as precious and innocent, yet chastened for her ignorance. This book is also squarely a horror book and I would suggest checking trigger warnings if that’s something you like to do. It is not so much that I wanted the story to erase the obvious historical antisemitism that is being evoked here - it was real, constant and pervasive and that obviously deserves its own page time - but when we had a Yehuli character so prominent, it seems a shame to have only the opinions of those who hate him on the page, never his own, especially when so many of those hatreds are so caricaturedly ugly. The redeeming characters of the novel were Rose and Undine in the background, the development of their cruelty from their trauma was so raw and well presented.I am in the odd position of greatly appreciating this book from a thematic and literary standpoint but also knowing it does not fit my personal tastes. As for Sevas, I wished the author showed more of this character, his life outside Marlinchen's world, his past, his feelings and motivations.