Nettle & Bone

"Yes. I love this book! 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. The images in this book are so striking. There’s a wheel full of the dead that chases you around an underground labyrinth of tombs, trying to crush and subsume grave robbers. There’s a woman being controlled by a sadistic puppet that sits on her shoulder, but she can’t bear the thought of being cut free from its power. And there’s humour – a particular favourite of mine was a chicken that is really a demon, but at the same time, emphatically a chicken. It isn’t based directly on any fairy tale. Ursula Vernon (that’s T. Kingfisher’s real name, which she also writes under) told us that The Princess and the Pea was a jumping off point: ‘It’s a very lighthearted fairy tale on the surface: and then you start to ask questions like, why does the prince want a princess who bruises that easily, and is that sensitive? And it gets really unpleasant really fast…’"

"Ursula Vernon—writing under her pen name T. Kingfisher—scooped the title of ‘Best Novel’ for the first time this year, but has previously won awards in the Graphic Story, Short Story, Novelette, and Series categories. 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. And, as in fairy tales, that world is not universally good or kind. As the Chicago Review of Books has observed , Kingfisher’s novels “stand out from the particular trend in the speculative publishing industry to push for narratives that are more optimistic, agentive, and hopeful.” But Nettle and Bone is also very funny; as noted in Strange Horizons , Kingfisher “understands that humour and horror are twins.” Kingfisher herself has written of the need for humour and hope in heavy themes: “If a book can make you feel better and stronger and wiser, instead of paralyzed, then you can do something with that.”"