Lady Cop Makes Trouble by Amy Stewart (audio)

Posted on June 8, 2026 by pagesofjulia

It’s been years since I listened to Girl Waits with Gun, and I guess I’d forgotten all about it*, but I’m so happy to have now rediscovered Stewart’s work. I love Constance Kopp: subversive, contrary, big and strong, determined to do the work she sees fit. As we left her, Miss Kopp lives in the New Jersey countryside with her two sisters: no-nonsense Norma, who loves her carrier pigeons and has strong opinions about everything but rarely leaves the farm; and Fleurette, young, flighty, fashion-forward, and yearning to live in a wider world. (Also, Fleurette is not in fact a sister but Constance’s own daughter, although I still don’t think she knows it.)

Lady Cop Makes Trouble offers us two main mystery plotlines, but also importantly follows the home lives of the Kopp sisters and of Sheriff Heath. Following the events of that earlier book, Constance is proud to be employed as a sheriff’s deputy in her rural county. She was promised a badge, but that’s now in jeopardy because, predictably, the 1915 New Jersey public (not least, the sheriff’s wife) is not sure about having a “lady” deputy (or a “girl” one), let alone Constance’s take on the job, which involves wrestling suspects to the grimy ground, whether in New Jersey or New York City. It’s quite unfortunate, then, that Constance happens to be the one on duty guarding an inmate who escapes from custody – never mind that he’d faked a debilitating injury and was in the hospital, during a power outage and a mass casualty event, and the (male) deputy who was supposed to be on duty had defected. It just goes to prove to those who wanted it proved, that Constance is unfit. Worse, it goes a ways toward making Constance question her fitness. She ramps up her devotion to the job in hunting down the fugitive – sometimes crossing over into insubordination in her enthusiasm. I found it interesting to see the conflict between following orders and Doing Right, especially as Sheriff Heath has always been a sympathetic character. And here we see him face some difficulties of his own.

The manhunt is the main mystery-plot-driver, but there is also a secondary puzzle of a case involving one of the female prisoners Constance is in charge of, a woman whose murder confession is being questioned. I like this second line for the foundation I think it might offer for future books.

*I had also forgotten that I wasn’t a huge fan of that first book, apparently, but I’m glad I did forget this. Something changed – about the books, about me? – and I was on board with the pace this time around. I can’t explain to you whether it got snappier or I got more patient, but this reader and this series have come into sync. (Stewart did bring this one down to 320 pages.) A benefit to my long hiatus: there are now seven books in the series! Oh, good.

I was once again pleased by Christina Moore’s narration, and appreciated the same things I did in that earlier review: historical setting and detail; some very funny exchanges, between the Kopp sisters but also Constance with many others; characters; and now pacing. I am already on to book three, with no more qualms.

Rating: 7 nights in a cell.

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Brigands and Breadknives by Travis Baldree (audio)

Posted on June 5, 2026 by pagesofjulia

I am crazy about these books, and their narration (by the author, who has more audio-narration credits than author ones to his name). This is the third in the Legends and Lattes series, and there is a collection of related short stories promised which I am definitely excited for, but I deeply wish for more novels!

As a series, I find the chronology interesting and a little unusual. In Legends and Lattes, we saw Viv end her mercenary career and open a coffee shop (bravely, in a town that had never heard of coffee). As far as Viv’s storyline, we left her fairly settled – no obvious sequel there. So, instead, book two, Bookshops and Bonedust, rewound time and saw a young Viv, early in the career we have seen her leave behind. She faced a different challenge there, and resolved it as she made an important new friend – and then rode off into the sunset to make an earnest go of that mercenary career. (We have now seen her start it, and end it, but the time itself is still largely untouched. Maybe that’s where another novel fits!) In book three, we now follow up with Fern, the friend Viv made in book two and then parted from. Years later – following Viv’s successful coffee shop, marriage, and settling – they reunite. And then Fern goes off on her own adventures, leaving Viv largely outside of the narrative. So firstly, as a series, I find this one fascinating in its sequencing. I like it fine. I wonder about the author’s creation process, and suspect he’s one of those who discovers his stories as they unfold for him, no plotting. Whatever it is, it’s working!

So. Fern, years after the events of Bookshops, has left her bookshop and her lifelong home behind. It will take much of the book to clearly label what she’s experienced: depression, ennui, boredom? In some desperation to find a new spark, she takes an old friend – Viv – up on an offer via correspondence, and travels to the city of Thune with an elderly Pot Roast in tow. They reunite, it is wonderful, and Viv (and Tandri and Cal and Thimble) help set Fern up in a new bookshop. But this does not solve her existential suffering. And so Fern gets drunk and flees: specifically, she semi-on-purpose goes to sleep in the cart of wildly famous, centuries-old hero Astryx One-Ear, the Oathmaiden, a warrior elf of great renown. Thus she stows away and becomes a member of a rollicking expedition to transport the bounty prisoner Zyll, an orange-haired goblin, across the Territories.

The motley crew is then made up of Astryx (ancient elf warrior), Fern (former-bookseller rattkin), Zyll (goblin criminal of few but hilarious words), occasionally a demonic chicken sort of thing, Astryx’s fabled Elder Blade, Nigel, who is sentient and talks (quite a lot), and eventually a former Elder Blade which has been “diminished” into a breadknife. He winds up with Fern, who calls him Breadlee. They encounter courtly and polite antagonists as well as murderous and duplicitous ones. The ending is a wonderful and wildly funny surprise. Zyll’s one-liners are K I L L I N G me; I can’t stop thinking about her.

These books are funny, sweet, thoughtful, imaginative, and totally absorbing. Please, Travis, please, write more of this world.

Rating: 8 pieces of paper.

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The Astral Library by Kate Quinn (audio)

Posted on June 1, 2026 by pagesofjulia

I don’t recall where I got this book recommended, but it was likely this enticing Shelf review by my colleage Katie. And what’s not to like: escaping into magical libraries, with some fantastical threats to manage, but also, spinning off into fictional worlds and making a difference. I found the start a little slow, or a little negative: we meet Alix on a truly bad day. A twenty-something aged out of the foster system, alone in the world, broke, she loses one of her three terrible jobs, gets her hours cut at another, and finds out her bank account has been hacked, making her measly $36.82 unavailable to her. Oh, and she gets kicked out of her shitty apartment. The one bright note is that the handsome Beau Sato-Jones, who runs a sumptuous boutique making lush historical costumes, needs her to work a couple of bookkeeping hours. The reader suspects that he think of Alix as an actual friend, but she doesn’t seem to take that seriously. And so, like so many bookish desperates before her, Alix heads to the library. There, she stumbles through a door.

From here, Alix finds the Astral Library and meets the Librarian. She learns of the option to live inside a book’s world – every bookworm’s dream, we are told (strangely, I’m not sure I’ve fantasized about this, although I’ll keep considering) – and is wholeheartedly ready to make the leap. But strange happenings in the Astral Library inspire her to instead ally herself with the Librarian. Alix becomes, however temporarily, a page. She travels to Arthur Conan Doyle’s London, and onward. On her way to finding her own home in a fictional world, she inhabits many, eventually making the cause of the Astral Library her own. And Beau will of course reappear, because obviously traveling to the worlds of Brontë and Austen require costume changes, and wouldn’t you know it, the Astral Library’s costuming department was getting threadbare.

As I said, the beginning of this book had me a bit down, with Alix’s string of unlikely and dour bad luck. But as soon as we hit that world of magic (and a delightfully grumpy Librarian), things picked up considerably. Alix’s crusade against bureaucracy, in defense of human rights, and centrally, in favor of the lofty raison d’être of libraries themselves can feel a bit pat, for those who have dwelt in this righteous space for a while; but honestly, it’s still not stale. There is a rousing speech or two, in advance of a satisfying ending.

The Astral Library has notes of romance, plenty of luxuriating in the power of story, lavish costuming, body positivity, and badass librarians. Also some critique of technology, as well as double-crossings and pain, but all resolved at the finish. Saskia Maarleveld narrates with great style, and I also enjoyed Kate Quinn’s reading of her own author’s note, and a conversation between Quinn and Maarleveld. I savored this presentation, and this was a solid work of escapism (Alix’s favorite) as well as an indulgent soak in library love, fantasy-style. I’d do it all over again – and, if Quinn is listening, I’d love to spend more time with Alix.

Rating: 7 tablets.

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As If by Isabel Waidner

Posted on May 29, 2026 by pagesofjulia

This surreal, unsettling doppelgänger story considers questions of identity, grief, and whether acting may be a route to reality.

As If, Isabel Waidner’s fifth novel, features two lookalike strangers who, after a chance meeting, with no spoken agreement, exchange lives. With notes of Stranger on a Train (minus the murders), their mutual obsession threatens both men’s tenuous, borrowed realities.

In alternating first-person narratives, readers encounter Aubrey Lewis–“former actor whose career has come to nothing…. Husband who lost his wife and subsequently himself”–at the point where Lindsey Korine enters Lewis’s dumpy sublet apartment in central London. Following the losses of both work and wife Laurie (to cancer), Lewis is moldering away, on the cusp of no-showing an audition. Korine follows him home and lets himself in, drawn to their physical sameness. He’s been sleeping rough after walking out on his wife and young child. Cold, he helps himself to two coats off the rack in the apartment. The coats belong not to Lewis but to the sublessor. Both men are marked by absences: of possessions, of self-worth. Discovering that Lewis intends to skip his audition, Korine decides to attend: for moral support, he thinks, and then to stand in. Korine, as Lewis, gets the job. Lewis walks out of the apartment and disappears. Korine, with no background or training, seizes the acting opportunity with surprising zeal. While Lewis is camped under the same bridge that his counterpart once used, Korine’s wife and son happen by. They call him by the other man’s name and take him home.

Korine’s wife, also named Laurie, has recently recovered from cancer treatment. Lewis is enlivened by the chance to care for Korine’s son (he and the late Laurie had wanted maybe one day to have a child). As the story unfolds, in dual narratives, Korine-as-Lewis struggles on the set of a new television show: not only must he play the assigned character (whose name he confuses with that of his abandoned son), but for his colleagues’ benefit, he must play Lewis as well. And Lewis cares for the child (whose name he confuses with a character he was asked to play for television). But the men are so concerned with each other’s lives that they will jeopardize their own.

The twisty plot of As If echoes the television show that made Lewis’s career, in which “one sleuth, A. Smythe… was hired to keep watch on another sleuth, B. Smith, who was in turn hired to keep watch on A. Smythe. Unbeknownst to each other, neither Smythe nor Smith do anything other than observe each other, creating an existential feedback loop.” Both anxiety-ridden, first-person voices emphasize the men’s troubled states of mind, with short, staccato phrasing and abrupt punctuation: “Why not. Where was he.” The effect is an unsettling novel of doubles, failures, missed and second chances: ghostly, cerebral, and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the April 30, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 clothing choices.

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The Reluctant Queen by Sarah Beth Durst (audio)

Posted on May 25, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Following The Queen of Blood is The Reluctant Queen, at center position in this trilogy. I continue to admire Durst’s worldbuilding and characters, imagination, and the hard choices and moral gray areas she presents. On the other hand, the sedate pacing that I felt worked in the Spellshop series is getting a little less effective here.

I fully expected the title to refer to Queen Daleina, who took the crown at, I think, nineteen years old. Not the strongest heir to the throne – in fact, she might be the weakest in terms of pure magical power – she is the only survivor of the massacre in the coronation grove, and therefore the new Queen of Renthia. She was decidedly reluctant… but is not the titular character. Instead, here comes a big plot twist and a spoiler but from quite early in this novel: Daleina is sick, soon to die, and therefore Renthia needs a new heir on standby, stat – but, let’s review again from book one, all the other heirs were killed when Daleina became queen. So, unusually, there ensues a great big scramble for one. Here we learn that, before the academies where Daleina and her peers were trained, Renthia used to find its women and girls of power – its heirs – in an older way: the champions traveling the villages, looking for regular citizens. And so that’s what Champion Ven does here.

And he finds a gem. Naelin is a woodswoman, a wife (to a pretty worthless husband) and a mother to two young children. She has always kept her power hidden, believing it will only get her killed, as it did her mother before her. But when Ven discovers her, he finds that she is the most powerful woman he has ever known, even in her raw, untrained form. She is also staunchly opposed to taking on responsibility beyond her family unit. It takes much of the book to convince her that the sense of duty she feels toward her own children may need to expand to the entire land.

One thing this book kept me thinking about was the tension between ego and chest-thumping, and a true sense of service. I already said that Daleina struck me as a pretty reluctant queen in her own right; by contrast to Naelin, she was there on purpose, training with the specific goal of maybe becoming queen, but not because she thought she deserved it or was owed it or wanted the glory. She struck me as being always clear that it would be a burden, a responsibility, and it was about keeping people safe, not about promoting herself – in contrast to the previous queen, and to some of her classmates at the academy (one in particular). Naelin is even more reluctant, resistant to helping anyone she did not birth herself – at a level that eventually felt pretty selfish to me, in fact. I felt a little impatient with her slowness to realize that queendom is not a prize, but a responsibility; and in turn, those around her who were in a position to advise, never took this tack directly enough for my tastes.

Some of this is due to the classic need, in storytelling, to hold back the revelation of certain details. Some of this is due to an accurate portrayal of human nature. But I sometimes felt like we could have moved things along a little more quickly than we did. Durst excels in painting a picture, a scene, and an inner turmoil. Sometimes she may indulge in a little more of that than serves her story. Especially when we got into some really high-stakes action episodes, I think we could move past the inner monologue, and especially when the inner monologues were reviews of character elements already very well established throughout the book.

I’m still stoked on these characters and the stakes of their world, and excited about where Durst chose to leave the plot hanging for book three – I’m genuinely invested in finding out what our queens will do next about the tricky situation we’ve left them in. So, a little impatient with pacing sometimes, but still in.

Rating: 7 cakes.

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The Jewelled Moth by Katherine Woodfine

Posted on May 22, 2026 by pagesofjulia

This sequel to The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow begins by introducing a new family of characters: first we meet Mei Lim, the daughter of a Chinese immigrant father and an English mother. She and her family live in the Chinatown section of Limehouse in London’s East End: her two parents, her older brother and younger twin brothers, and until recently, her grandfather, now deceased. We learn early of the Lims’ concern for the missing Moonbeam Diamond, a storied piece of Chinese and family history.

From here, the novel continues in the same satisfying vein as Sparrow, starring our foursome – Sophie, Lil, Billy, and Joe – but especially our two plucky heroines. All four are employed at Sinclair’s, with Joe in particular marveling at his good fortune to have escaped the Baron’s gang and found a legal and relatively comfortable lifestyle. It’s debutante season (and brief excerpts from a manual on those social mores punctuate this text, as a similar etiquette book did the last), and it is a fashionable, wealthy, privileged, not to say spoiled, young debutante who approaches Sophie and Lil with a case. A precious jewelled moth brooch, a gift from a very eligible suitor to Miss Veronice Whiteley, has been stolen. At its center: the famous Moonbeam Diamond.

Sophie and Lil, and their male counterparts and assistants and admirers Billy and Joe, are slowly joined by a few high-society friends and the Lims in chasing down the moth and the diamond, ferreting out the true identity of the intimidating Baron, and righting all the wrongs – including, hopefully, ensuring their own safety. Incidentally, Sophie finds a photograph of her late parents that calls some of her own history into question, and thereby sets us up neatly for book three.

I continue to find these books fun, engrossing, and easy to read. I look forward to more.

Rating: 7 dumplings.

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Heartsong by TJ Klune (audio)

Posted on May 18, 2026 by pagesofjulia

As ever, here you will find spoilers from previous books in the series.

These are pure enjoyment and I can hardly stand the time I have to spend away from the Green Creek series on audio. Also, this image is the audiobook cover, but I do prefer the print version, below.

We spend this book with Robbie, and there is one big, early-ish spoiler that I think I’d like to preserve for any readers who are likely to get into the series, so we’ll do some white text below (highlight to read) and then keep the rest of this review brief. I’m keeping my spoilers to early in the book, still.

The book is told from Robbie’s point of view (as per usual), and in the early chapters, I was confused as to timeline, because he is with Michelle Hughes’ pack and apparently ignorant of the Bennetts, but also something is off. Does this precede the events in which Robbie meets the Bennetts, and importantly, Kelly? No: he has had his brain fucked with in a big way, his memories erased. While much of the book’s plot does handle issues that take place outside of Robbie’s head – werewolf wars and changes in the lives of other characters we’ve already come to care deeply for – the central and most important arc is interior. Robbie must rebuild his bonds with the Bennetts and with his mate, with those other players remembering their shared history and working hard not to take personally that Robbie does not. It’s excruciating.

What else to say? I’ve become very comfortable in and attached to both Klune’s storytelling style in this series, and Kirt Graves’ audio narration. These are the voices of these characters for me, and they do all have distinct voices: Robbie’s Chicago accent is pronounced, and that had been in previous books an occasional flavoring, but here is of course the main event. It took some getting used to. I salute Graves’ commitment to that acting. Also, I am no accent expert.

We end, obviously, on a major cliffhanger, with some of our favorites in grim circumstances. I’m barely holding on for book four.

Rating: 8 carvings.

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Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Posted on May 15, 2026 by pagesofjulia

In June 1973, Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, sisters aged twelve and fourteen, were sterilized without their consent in Montgomery, Alabama, by a federally funded agency. Outraged by this terrible violation, their social worker, Jessie Bly, reported it to a local attorney. Eventually, the case went to federal court in Washington, DC. The lead lawyer for the plaintiffs was Joseph Levin Jr. of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This case is considered a pivotal moment in the history of reproductive injustice, as it brought to light the thousands of poor women of color across the country who had been sterilized under federally funded programs.

Take My Hand is fiction, not a retelling of these events (Perkins-Valdez is quick to remind us), but an imagining of “the emotional impact of this moment and others like it.” The novel is told from the point of view of Civil Townsend, who is writing, decades after these events, to her adopted daughter, Anne. Anne is now twenty-three, the same age Civil had been when she’d gone to work at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic in her hometown.

Twenty-three years old. Eager to prove my daddy wrong. Anxious about my mother’s illness. Longing for love. Hoping to make a mark on the world. Young Civil, smiling shakily and unsurely but with all the awareness of a future that remains to be lived.

It is an interesting retrospective. Civil is now a doctor, but she began her medical career as a nurse, feeling that that’s where the work needed to be done (and rebelling against her father, who wished for her to be a doctor like him and like Civil’s grandfather too – a rare inheritance for a young Black woman in the 1970s). The novel flips back and forth between the 2016 journey that Civil makes from her newer home in Memphis, back to Montgomery to visit people she used to know, and Montgomery in 1973. In that earlier timeline, Civil narrates: she went to work at the clinic. She met her first home-visit case, the sisters Erica and India Williams, aged thirteen and eleven years old. We meet the other players in Civil’s life: her father, a doctor in their upper-middle-class Black community; her mother, a painter with mental health issues; her lifelong best friend, Ty, with whom things have gotten complicated; her new friend, Alicia, a fellow nurse at the clinic. Civil’s friends and family support her wish for the Williams family to have better chances, but none commit to it like Civil herself does. From our perspective, it is easy to see that she has terrible boundaries, moving far too deep into the Williamses’ orbit, involving herself in their lives far beyond the role of nurse at a community clinic. But when Erica and India are sterilized without consent, she does her best to seek justice for them, too.

This is a story of reproductive injustice, medical ethics, and racism. It is also the story of a young woman’s coming-of-age, learning about relationships and making her way in the world. It is based on the bare facts of a true court case, which immediately followed the uncovering of the horrifying Tuskegee experiment, and it is true to 1970s Alabama in broad terms. Civil herself is a fictional character – Perkins-Valdez sought but did not find accounts of the nurses at the clinic, so she imagined one. I am impressed by the emotional work of the Civil character, and, perhaps even more tricky, the complexity of certain other characters. There are no pure villains or heroes. The white nurse who heads up the clinic is initially someone Civil admires; then, when she directs the girls’ sterilization, becomes an enemy; but Civil winds up questioning the impulses of everyone involved. Who among us, believing in our own good intentions, does no harm?

I occasionally stopped to consider the way that especially Civil and her age-group peers, Alicia and Ty and others, talk to each other: it can feel a little stilted, a little explain-y, and I wondered if that dialog could have been written more naturally. But then again: these are college-age activists out to change their world. Didn’t we all deliver stiff speeches in that part of life? I think that dialog might have been realistic after all.

Take My Hand is a well-written, thought-provoking book about some of our lesser-known history, that I would strongly recommend. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy to read. Perkins-Valdez has done remarkable work in imagination, in execution, and in faithful reporting, and I think it’s an important book.

Rating: 7 records.

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Nymph by Sofia Montrone

Posted on May 11, 2026 by pagesofjulia

This sensual, yearning novel of personal tragedy and first love in the Northern Italian countryside will transport readers of all ages.

Sofia Montrone’s first novel, Nymph, handles the coming-of-age of a girl named Leo, alongside the aging of her family’s Italian agriturismo. Leo and her family–Leo’s Italian mother, her American father, her one-year-younger brother Max–spend every summer at the rural hotel, helping to run the family business. Readers watch Leo move toward adulthood over the course of two summers, when she is 10 and when she is 18.

When she is younger, Leo cleans rooms, collecting the motley items guests leave behind, and helps prepare food alongside her Nonna Tina. Max, who is better with people, works at the front desk. Their mother is unwell and mostly sleeps. Their father, a professor and a heavy drinker, reads and tells stories; his renditions of the epics of Homer are among the many threads that keep Leo captivated. She and Max “want to know where Atlantis is, what feathers are made of, whether hair grows right out of their scalps or from their tangled ends, and he tells them. They have no sense of what is real and what is play, only that the Absent-Minded Professor is a kind of god, all-knowing, and that with the right password, they will be privy to his secrets, which are the secrets of the world.” Leo idolizes her father. By the novel’s second part, the shape of her family will be changed irrevocably, and is still changing. Her Nonna Tina, the hotel’s faithful employee Davide, and Leo’s immediate family are maturing or withering. The hotel is in decline. Leo herself is on the cusp of the next stage of her life, as a newcomer–an American teenager, curious, creative, and enthralling–captures her attention.

“Nymph” refers to “those maidens that live in the rivers and trees” as well as “a baby grasshopper,” whose short life plays a role in Leo’s. Montrone’s debut tracks these several processes in prose as lovely, fleeting, subtle, and shocking as growing up ever is. Ten-year-old Leo experiences the fallibility of her most beloved elders, and 18-year-old Leo finds her first love and still more loss. These tentative steps toward adulthood are set against a striking rural and natural setting, punctuated by the World Cup games that hold Italy rapt. “The mountains are nimbed with green light. Dark shapes swoop over the grounds, whether bats or birds she cannot say, only that they form black whorls like clouds.” Nymph is concerned with growth, shedding, and origins. “Where does the story of one’s life begin? At birth, with one’s parents or grandparents, the first days of Italy and its legions of secretive, long-suffering women, Odysseus?” This nuanced, wise novel expands with quiet understatement to reach profundity.

This review originally ran in the April 17, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 pearl earrings.

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The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill (audio)

Posted on May 8, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Another wonderful story from Kelly Barnhill, and I’m so delighted to learn that there are many of them! Joy!

In mythic tones, we open with chapter 1: In Which a Story Is Told. (All chapters are titled this way.) “Yes. There is a witch in the woods. There has always been a witch in the woods. Will you stop your fidgeting for once?” Some chapters are voiced like this one, with an unnamed storyteller addressing an unnamed child (we get some hints as to their identities only very late); others are more traditional third-person narration. We begin in the Protectorate, a place ruled by fog and cloud and sorrow, where the Elders, led by Grand Elder Gherland, uphold an important tradition. Once a year, on the Day of Sacrifice, they place the community’s youngest baby in a circle of sycamores in the dangerous woods to be taken by an evil witch, that she not destroy everything. The Elders are supported by the Sisters of the Star, who dwell in the Tower, holding all knowledge and skill; they are formidable warriors as well as scholars, mysterious and separate from the rest of the Protectorate, whose citizens, if not Elders, live in poverty and deprivation. We are also informed early on that Grand Elder Gherland knows there is no witch. The sacrifices are instead meant to keep the people subjugated and sad and under the thumb of the Elders.

But we also watch while a witch – a kindhearted, helpful witch, who lives in service to those around her – travels through the woods to collect this year’s sacrificed infant. She has no idea why the Protectorate’s people insist on doing this silly, cruel thing, abandoning infants in the woods, but each year she makes the trip and carries the infant, keeping them safe, warm, and fed, through the woods to the people in the Free Cities on the other side, where she rehomes them with loving families and they grow up safe, happy, loved. So there is a witch, and she does take the babies, but not like the Protectorate thinks.

The witch is Xan, and she is 500 years old. There is a bog monster named Glerk who is poetry-obsessed and much, much older, older even than magic. They are accompanied, in their lives deep in the woods by the bog, by a dragonling named Fyrian, who is just still very small (despite also being 500 years old), but believes himself to be simply enormous, because Xan and Glerk let him think he is – they say that they are giants. These are all characters of love, whimsy, silliness, and good humor, as well as of profound good. They are joined by Luna, the latest abandoned baby, whom Xan accidentally enmagics. And as the story unfolds, we also follow Grand Elder Gherland (not a sympathetic character); his nephew Antain, who wants for the Protectorate to do better; Sister Ignatia, head of all the sisters, who has a murky past; and a mother who becomes a madwoman in a tower but can be so much more. This is a grand fairy tale of a story, with dark, scary woods, dragons, volcanoes, sacrifices born of fear and of love, tigers, shapeshifting, paper birds, devotion, magic, built families… it’s a gorgeous book about everything. The beast, the bog, the poem, the world: “they are all the same thing, you know.” “I am the bog and the bog is me.”

I was reminded of “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” and “The Lottery,” most obviously in the early, baby-sacrifice scenes, but throughout with certain metaphors about what loyalty is earned to whom, and who should give up personal priorities for a greater good. There were several delicious layers of dramatic irony and miscommunication, and misdirection about who the bad guys are (‘guys’ in this case being gender-neutral, obviously). I found it a lovely story about goodness, courage, love, and the many ways we care for one another and make families. Like one of our protagonists here, I have also struggled with the observation that “there is no love without loss,” but Barnhill makes an argument that it’s worth it. Christina Moore narrates tremendously. I’m such a fan. Do check it out.

Rating: 9 bunnies.

PS: I found out after the fact that this is billed as a book ‘for young readers’ and was quite surprised. That is, all violence and threat of violence is quite tame – baby ‘sacrifices’ entail just placing them gently in the woods where they are collected safely, and the worst injury suffered is a bunch of paper cuts (like, the worst paper cuts of all time) – but I found the themes complex and thought-provoking. I was thinking of this as a work of great imagination and whimsy, not one for young readers (I’m seeing ages 8+, and grades 5-9). So, take this as a strong recommendation for all readers.

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