Wednesday, June 15, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher

 





Nettle & Bone is the latest book by author T Kingfisher (aka the Adult pen name of author Ursula Vernon), one of my favorite authors writing Science Fiction and Fantasy out there.  It's also the first in a while in certain ways - it's a clearly adult novel, but neither horror nor self-published (like her White Rat books, which are utterly incredible) and apparently is her first ever Bestseller.  And again, Kingfisher's works are usually brilliant, often taking classic fantasy concepts, mixing in horror and romance, and then adding in her wild imagination and oft-hilarious snappy dialogue to form poignant, entertaining and really relevant works that last for days in the mind and demand rereading.  

Nettle & Bone is no exception to that track record.  This is the story of a princess who doesn't want to be, who was happy all along in a convent doing menial work, who embarks on a journey to kill the prince who is abusing her sister - and who killed her first sister.  It's a story featuring a main cast that includes a dog made of bones, a fairy godmother who is better off at curses than blessings, and a dust-wife who manipulates the dead - all of whom have their own quirks and problems.  It's a story about duty, about caring and fighting to do what should be impossible because it's right, even when one's just a normal person, and it's oh so so good.  


------------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
Princess Marra never wanted to be a Princess.  Or a Hero.  As the third princess of a weak kingdom - desired by neighboring kingdoms solely for its access to valuable harbor territory - Marra always felt uncomfortable with acting as a princess in the Palace, and so she's filled with relief when she is sent away to a convent to be raised among a set of nuns.  And Marra thrived in the Convent, where she made sure she was assigned just as many menial tasks as the others, and learned from the kind wise abbess and Sister Apothecary.  

But as Marra thrived in the Convent, her beloved first sister was married off to a powerful neighboring kingdom's prince....and finds herself dead just a few months later.  Then her second sister is married off to the same prince, and finds herself constantly pregnant and abused by the Prince, an abuse tolerated and ignored by their Queen Mother, but an abuse that Marra cannot, after years, continue to tolerate.  

And so Marra sets out from the Convent to find a way to free her sister by killing the Prince.  But the Prince is protected by a powerful magical godmother, and so Marra will need to do the impossible, and find impossible companions to get the task done.  And so Marra will find herself a party of oddball impossible companions - a dog made of bones, an exiled knight, a dust-wife who speaks to the dead, and a godmother who is better at cursing than blessing - as she embarks on a quest to kill a monstrous Prince no one can or will seemingly do anything about....
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Nettle & Bone begins In Media Res, and honestly that's the book's biggest stumble - it introduces us to the Bonedog, a really great book pet character, and to some of the creepiness you should expect in this book (Blighted Land!  Cannibals!), but really kind of makes it a bit confusing at first as the story jumps back in forth in time for the first few chapters....before settling in chronologically from there on. And once the story starts moving from there, it just absolutely works, as it tell us Marra's backstory, introduces her as a character, shows her actions and determination when confronted with the horrors being inflicted upon her sister, features her gathering up her cast of allies in a way that feels natural and not simply like a series of fetch quests to gather characters before the major adventure can begin.

So much of that comes from the combination of T Kingfisher's incredible imagination and her tremendous character work.  Take Marra for example, who first seems like the type of determined heroine you might have seen before, performing not one, but two impossible tasks in order to get the dust-wife to help her kill the Prince and save her sister.  But unlike the typical heroine, Marra is a normal person, a tired person, a girl who didn't want to be a minor princess but was happy in a convent doing menial labor, and who is way way way out of her depth.  She's the driving force for the party yes, and certainly intelligent when the situation calls for it - and definitely kindhearted - but she feels real because of how normal she is.  Even her relationship with her sisters works in this regard - the sister Marra is trying to save is the one who she thought hated her when she was young and not the beloved one she cared for....because that's what you do for your family, especially when confronted with that sister being horribly abused.  This depth is similar in almost all of our main human cast, from Fenris the Knight to Agnes the Godmother, (and whose depth I'm not going to spoil) with the exception really of the Dust-Wife, who mainly serves to be the journey's true leader as an exasperated magical woman who knows her limitations even if we never get her backstory and goals - and so she works as our guide to this wide imaginative world, as the one who knows to Marra's naive viewpoint.  

And oh what an imaginative world.  You have the aforementioned bone dog, who is adorable and you'll care for tremendously, to go along with several other pets of course like a Rooster named Finder and a Demon-infested Hen.  Then you have a Goblin Market, Saints, an absolutely horrifying innkeeper (oh god), the blessings and curses of Godmothers, and so so much more.  As always Kingfisher's imagination often runs to the macabre, but it works so well and it creates a story of a group of people trying to do what's right for others, even when doing so seems impossible in a world where those in power simply accept horrors because what might happen otherwise could be worse.  It's a story of people who grow to care for each other in a world that is otherwise practically cruel, and after a bumpy start is just real wonderful from beginning to end.  Oh and as usual, the dialogue and events is often pretty funny too.  

So yeah, another T Kingfisher winner.  If you haven't been reading her yet, what are you doing even?

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