Nettle & Bone
by Ursula Vernon, writing as T. Kingfisher
Recommendations from our site
“It’s completely original, but also completely captures the classic spirit of fairy tales. Marra is trying to rescue her sister, who has married into powerful royalty, and is being terribly abused. So there’s a quest, and there are three tasks, and a fairy godmother, and the goblin market; and all the magic has the haunting, under-explained quality of true fairy tales.” Read more...
“Nettle and Bone follows Marra, the third and least important princess of a small kingdom, who is sent to a convent following her sister’s marriage to a powerful prince—he doesn’t want her producing any rivals to the throne. The tone is set: this man is trouble. When Marra understands just how much trouble, and how dire her sister’s situation is, she sets out to enforce justice. The journey is packed full of familiar motifs. She must accomplish three impossible tasks, visit a goblin market, encounter a necromancer-witch and a fairy godmother, and descend into labyrinthine tombs. Between these set-pieces and archetypal characters, we find a dazzling array of detail: a demon that is also, emphatically, a chicken; a woman voluntarily controlled by a horrifying wooden child; a crushing wheel of dead souls…This is fairytale fantasy. The magic is chilling and under-explained, considered supernatural even within the uncanny world of the book.” Read more...
The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of 2023: The Hugo Awards
