Tuesday, June 14, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Juniper & Thorn by Ava Reid

 



Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on June 21, 2022 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

Juniper & Thorn is the second book from author Ava Reid, who previously wrote The Wolf and the Woodsman, an Eastern European inspired fantasy featuring an essentially half-Pagan half-Jewish girl and an essentially Christian* prince attempting to stop a fellow Christian Prince from using magic to enact an oppressive reign of terror over the country.  Although the romance between the main characters in that book wasn't the greatest, I enjoyed its setting a lot (not least of which for its portrayal of Jewish culture in such a land) and it got a lot of deserved hype from people I read.  So I was very curious to try the follow up novel, in Juniper & Thorn.  

*The book used other names for these religions, but they're transparently Judaism and Christianity.  The same is the case here, so I'm just going to use the real world religious names here.*

Juniper & Thorn is a very different book however - yes there's an Eastern European setting again, this type in a fantasy Russian-esque land, and yes there's a romance between a girl who doesn't know much of the world and a man, one of whom is Jewish (although it's the man and he's not religious this time).  And yet this is not an adventure story - this is a tale* of abuse, as a witch girl who is one of three daughters of an abusive and xenophobic/anti-semitic wizard, who is used to being a doormat and just accepting things, until one act of rebellion changes everything.  It's a very hard tale to read, and while somewhat effective, was not really a book I loved for various reasons, not all of which were this book's fault.  More specifics after the jump:

*This tale is apparently a retelling of the Grimm story, The Juniper Tree, which I was unfamiliar with, and from looking it up on Wikipedia - so take this for what it's worth - the story is a very generous retelling, with similarly named and situated characters at times, but a very different story, so don't expect it to follow the same story beats here*.  


TRIGGER WARNING:  Child Abuse, Sexual Abuse/Rape, Abuse by a Guardian.  Abuse is a major theme of this book, and the sexual abuse is at one point somewhat explicit in a really hard to read chapter.   These sections go to the book's themes, but they will almost certainly be a bit too much for some readers, and they almost were for me.

-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
Marlinchen has never seen the world, or even the City, outside her father's lands.  Her father is Oblya's last wizard, cruel and harsh in part due to a curse put upon him by a rival that he would never be satisfied with anything and would only be hungry for everything, and he restricts his three daughters, all of whom have Witch powers, from ever reaching out to a City he knows to be dirty; a city that is changing to become more modern, with Ballet, and peoples of different cultures, and one without landed nobility like himself on orders of the Tsar.  Marlinchen's older sisters react to this differently than her - her eldest sister Undine is cruel and selfish, while her older middle sister Rose isn't as openly cruel, but is dismissive of Marlinchen's naivete - both of whom have the beauty Marlinchen has been told she lacks, and feel more comfortable resisting their father's rules.


But when Marlinchen follows her sisters to the City for once, and sees a Ballet dancer there who takes her breath away, she can't keep her mind off of him, and everything begins to change for her.  Soon she's finding out more about the world she's been kept away from, and finding that she might actually have things she wants on her own, something she would want other than to meekly prepare food for her father.  

But when her father finds out, he begins to restrict Marlinchen and her sisters even more, and when their finances get truly desperate, he begins to use his magic and power to terrorize not just Marlinchen, but the newfound things she cares about, forcing Marlinchen to make a choice: will she remain silent and beholden to his whims?  Or will she act out to try to save both herself and the City she never understood before these moments....
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Let's make this clear: Juniper & Thorn is a tale about abuse at its core, in many many ways.  Marlinchen and her sisters are abused by their father: who is a xenophobic racist and anti-semitic man and whose greed got him cursed by a rival witch to always want more....and he takes that out on his daughters and originally on his wife (who he transformed into a bird in what he called an accident and then let go, causing more trauma on the daughter who was trying to care for her).  He refuses to let them to enjoy their own lives, uses his magic to restrict their movements - at one point putting a curse that prevents them from leaving without impossibly getting some sand from an outside beach - and terrorizes them and the other beings (usually supernatural) who live on their farm territory.  His backwards hatred of the new ways only leads him to drive away potential sources of income, and he uses his daughters' witch powers - Marlinchen's ability to see someone's past memories from touching them, Rose's ability to make potions, and Undine's ability to see futures in water - to gain money which he then hoards for himself.  

And this abuse, spoiler but it really needs to be said here, goes beyond being merely verbally abusive.  At one horrifying point, he invites a local doctor, a racist phrenologist, to physically and sexually abuse Marlinchen in exchange for money, in a sequence that was way too descriptive for my taste.  And so the three daughters each react to this in different ways: Marlinchen becomes a doormat (she also becomes bulimic); Rose becomes complicit and contrary and dismissive; while Undine becomes outwardly cruel.  Nor is the abuse in this book limited to Marlinchen's father - the love interest, a ballet dancer named Sevastyan ("Sevas") was taken from his Jewish* family by a manager who clearly abuses him and demands sexual favors as well, leading Sevas to try and take it out in drink.  Everyone in this story is either being abused or abusing, which makes this a dark tale.  

*This is the second book in a row of Reid's in which a Jewish, even if not religious like here, character winds up in a romantic relationship with a non-Jew, and while there's nothing wrong with that on its surface, I'm kind of getting tired of that trope in books honestly.  So this might have also predisposed me to be a bit more weary of this book.* 

And so our story is essentially watching Marlinchen figure out how much of the monsters in the world are around her and Sevas and deciding eventually how much she can take - whether she can stand by and watch people be hurt, whether she can be silent when she starts having suspicions about the people in the City who have suffered horrifying deaths, and whether she can continue to suppress her own desires (now that she knows what they are) in support of her father's endless ones.  It's a rough story and it is effective, and the Eastern European/Russian setting is really well done as well, as a setting on the verge of changing from a more feudal/serfdom era to a modern one, and struggling as a result.  The magic is effectively done, and to the story's credit, a late book swerve is one I probably should have seen coming but wound up not doing so.  

So what you have in Juniper & Thorn is a story that effectively uses magic and an Eastern European setting to tell a story about abuse of many forms and how people react to it, and how a young woman can assert herself to move forward....So there is certainly value here, and I can get why people might "like" this book (I'm not sure I'd use "enjoy").  At the same time it is so thick, and sometimes more explicit than I'd like, that I'm not sure how much I'd recommend it compared to other books that deal with abuse in more interesting ways.  
  

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