A fairytale, folklore, and mythology nerd almost from birth, I pounced on this novel immediately.
Gornichec has taken a few abstract Norse myth characters and morphed them into one: the witch Angrboda, whose heart was cut out and her body burned by the Norse gods three times. And she, lover of trickster Loki and mother of monsters, each time stubbornly and painfully has brought herself back to life.
Gornichec’s skill and magic touch endow her protagonist with amazing emotional weight and resonance through her thoughts, fears, desires, and complicated relationships. As Angrboda and her strange children live their secretive, threatened, and isolated existence deep in the forest, we realize they’ll eventually ignite Gotterdammerung, the Dusk of the Gods.
Angrboda's story begins where most witch tales end: with being burnt. A punishment from Odin for sharing her visions of the future with the wrong people, the fire leaves Angrboda injured and powerless, and she flees into the furthest reaches of a remote forest. There she is found by a man who reveals himself to be the trickster god Loki, and her initial distrust of him-and any of his kind-grows reluctantly into a deep and abiding love.
Their union produces the most important things in her long life: a trio of peculiar children, each with a secret destiny, whom she…
Bridie Devine, an impoverished Irish detective in Victorian London, loathes wealthy gentlemen who fancy themselves amateur “scientists” and compete with other millionaires to collect oddities, both inanimate and alive. Her new case, presented as the kidnapping of one such toff’s missing “daughter,” is actually to recover a young mermaid: the fantastical, venomous-toothed crown jewel of his collection. Bridie collects oddities too (a retired circus-performer housemaid; the charming ghost of a boxer) but shelters and protects them.
This book indites exploitation of the (seemingly) helpless and societies fixated on status, whatever the cost. Kidd’s vivid portrayals and wryly humorous prose create a wild chase through a past disturbingly similar to our own material world.
Sherlock Holmes now feels rather dull by comparison.
London, 1863. Bridie Devine, the finest female detective of her age, is taking on her toughest case yet. Reeling from her last job and with her reputation in tatters, a remarkable puzzle has come her way. Christabel Berwick has been kidnapped. But Christabel is no ordinary child. She is not supposed to exist.
As Bridie fights to recover the stolen child she enters a world of fanatical anatomists, crooked surgeons and mercenary showmen. Anomalies are in fashion, curiosities are the thing, and fortunes are won and lost in the name of entertainment. The public love a spectacle and Christabel may…
This book is exactly what I love in a folklore-inspired novel: an original tale artfully revised or updated with contemporary connections and resonance. Honoring the original while linking it to new or modern events in a continuing literary conversation. The test is whether this is done well and entertainingly without losing the familiarity and history. Nethercott delivers!
The classic Eastern European tale of Baba Yaga underpins her quirky, affecting novel. The mythical house on giant chicken legs is shipped from long-term storage in a Ukrainian warehouse to the US, inherited by Yaga’s descendants: a 20-ish brother and sister from an eccentric puppeteering family who’ve been estranged since childhood. Bellatine’s a talented woodworker; Isaac is a busker/con artist.
They already have serious baggage from a strange, nomadic childhood. How they deal with a mobile, sentient house while trying to evade a malevolent force that revels in human suffering is a complex, vivid story with ties to eternal social and familial issues. Engrossing and satisfying!
In the tradition of modern fairy tales like Neil Gaiman's American Gods and Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver comes an immersive fantasy saga, a debut novel about estranged siblings who are reunited after receiving a mysterious inheritance.
“A wonderfully imaginative, wholly enchanting novel of witness, survival, memory, and family that reads like a fairy tale godfathered by Neil Gaiman and Tim Burton in a wild America alive with wonders and devils alike. Thistlefoot shimmers with magic and mayhem and a thrilling emotional momentum.” —Libba Bray, bestselling author of The Diviners
The Yaga siblings—Bellatine, a young woodworker, and Isaac, a wayfaring street…
This time The Night Bazaar (midnight marketplace for the rare, strange, occult, and dangerous) journeys to 19th century London. There its vendors will purvey curious services, forbidden wares, and rare objects unavailable elsewhere, for any price. The Bazaar’s proprietress, enigmatic and unflappable Madame Vera, escorts readers on a tour of eerie, fantastical Britain in ten linked short stories, with occasional appearances by such luminaries as Sherlock Holmes, occultist Madam Blavatsky, and Queen Anne Boleyn.
Set at the Bazaar or elsewhere, all stories are linked to its London appearance by a curse, a spell, or an object—found, inherited, purchased, or stolen by the unsuspecting, foolish, or greedy. Within the tales lurk ghosts (royal and common), time-traveling pocket watches, a traveling theatre, a shop of malevolent mirrors, and 1960s Carnaby Street shopgirls.
