Our unlikely heroine is Marra, the youngest daughter of the tiny Harbor Kingdom and a princess who prefers needlework to the politics of ruling. A true delight from the first page to the last, it’s a deeply feminist, fiercely funny fairytale that delightful and unexpectedly subverts so many of the tropes we typically see in stories like it.

Any sort of magic, remember, always comes with a price.Īll these things are true of Nettle & Bone, a sharp, less-than-three-hundred-page novel that packs the emotional punch of an epic three times its length. And though her stories have satisfying endings, they are often more than a little bittersweet. Her characters are layered and three-dimensional, from princesses shot through with steel to gruff witches with secret emotional depths. Her fantasy book sare shot through with both sharp humor and uncomfortable threads of pitch-black realness, dealing with issues that range from emotional trauma and domestic violence to standard fairy tale pacts and seemingly impossible quests. Kingfisher is the penname of children’s author Ursula Vernon, and it seems easy enough to see why she might want to keep the two lanes of her work from crossing over too much. From its ragtag group of heroes-which includes witches, demons, and resurrected bone animals-to its unflinchingly honest representation of the abuse and misogyny that makes much of its fantasy world go round, there’s a specifically wonderful alchemy at work here that threads the thin line between humor, horror, and heart in order to create something that feels both fresh and utterly necessary.

Kingfisher’s Nettle & Bone is precisely that sort of story, please understand the scope of the praise I am conveying. As an author, Beagle both understands the reasons we keep coming back to these kinds of stories and shares our love of them, which makes the simple act of reading his works a soul-deep delight. Beagle’s unique style, which is simultaneously bleak and beautiful, heartbreaking and heartfelt, and full of bittersweet ruminations about loss and regret, mimics the delicate and complicated strangeness of the best sorts of fairytales. Beagle, whose stories like The Last Unicorn, The Innkeeper’s Song, and A Fine and Private Place were absolutely formative for me as both a reader and fantasy fan. One of the highest compliments that I personally can give a book is that it reminds me of the work of Peter S.

Nettle and bone