Review of Nettle & Bone—Fairy-Tale Fantasy

Marrying a prince seems like the ending of a fairy tale, but for Marra’s sister’s it is only the beginning of a nightmare. So, Marra sets out on her own fairy tale quest to find whatever magic or powerful allies can kill a prince in T. Kingfisher’s Nettle & Bone, which came out last year. Having thoroughly enjoyed Kingfisher’s Poe-inspired horror tale What Moves the Dead, I was excited to see what this author would bring to more straightforward fantasy. Kingfisher certainly has a gift for creating fantasy worlds that seem comfortingly familiar and yet also strange and unique. 

As the youngest princess of a vulnerable harbor kingdom, Marra is naïve to the harsh realities of political scheming. When her oldest sister is married off to the prince of the Northern Kingdom and then abruptly shipped home in a coffin, Marra mourns. But it is only years later, when she notices that her second sister Kania—now married to that same prince and constantly pregnant—is covered in bruises that Marra realizes something is terribly wrong. No one will stand up to Prince Vorling, who holds the fate of their tiny kingdom in his hands. So, Marra takes it upon herself to kill the prince and save her sister. She sets out from the convent where she has been set aside (for safekeeping, she supposes, in case her sister were to die and another princess was needed) to find the most powerful magic she knows of: that of the dust-wife, an old woman who lives in graveyards and communes with the dead. The dust-wife sets Marra a series of impossible tasks—including sewing a cloak out of owlcloth and nettles and building a dog from cursed bones—and is so impressed with Marra’s success that she agrees to join her quest. Accompanied by the dust-witch and her new bone dog, Marra journeys into a goblin market and back to the Northern Kingdom, picking up more allies along the way. But even with powerful magic and a brave knight by her side, can Marra truly save her sister without destroying her kingdom?

The cleverly crafted world of Nettle & Bone pulls from both specific myths and fairy tales and general archetypes of these stories. One such archetype is the series of impossible tasks, which we see in literature from the twelve labors of Hercules to the lover’s demands in the English folk ballad “Scarborough Fair.” Another broad fairy-tale concept that plays an important role in the story is the fairy godmother. As in the classic Sleeping Beauty tale, the fairy godmothers in this book are expected to bless the newborn children of the royal family, and are capable of both great blessings and curses. Nettle & Bone, however, turns this concept on its head a bit. Instead of an evil fairy godmother who avenges slights by cursing children, there is one powerful godmother who is herself a victim of ancient magic and gives mixed blessings, while another has a great capacity for evil magic but it is offset by her kindhearted nature. Apart from these larger concepts, Nettle & Bone also works in references to specific works of literature or folktales. The goblin market that Marra and the dust-wife visit is very loosely inspired by Christina Rossetti’s poem, while also incorporating wider concepts from fairy folklore such as glamours, fairy bargains, and magic-addled humans. Marra references a particular folk ballad in the opening chapter as she pieces her bone dog together, singing a variation of a song often called “The Twa Sisters,” about a young woman whose bones and hair are made into a harp after she is drowned by her older sister. Within the same scene, Marra also alludes to a specific legend about a hero called Mordecai who slew a poisoned worm, which seems to have been created by Kingfisher for the world of this book. Marra will refer back to this legend many times throughout the novel as she tries to reconcile herself to the role of hero and situate her experiences within the world of storytelling. The combination of reference to familiar stories as well as new bits of folklore created around existing concepts helps to make the world of Nettle & Bone feel instantly recognizable while also not entirely like anything we have seen before. 

This novel also incorporates multiple twists on my favorite trope from any quest narrative: the journey to the underworld. Marra’s first excursion into a hellish other world is during her second impossible task when she ventures into the blistered land in search of cursed bones. In this region, the land has suffered a blight that makes the soil appear blistered and swollen and kills all crops. The people there, forced by starvation to resort to cannibalism, are punished by the gods with insanity. But the blistered land is no mere geographical region that can be located on a map and traversed in the usual way. Instead, Marra seems to access it through the dust-wife’s magic. Its borders are clearly marked out by shadow and closely policed by those who live outside—the mad cannibals of the blistered land cannot be allowed to rejoin the untainted world of the living. Marra’s visit to the goblin market can be viewed as another descent into an underworld. The land of faerie is often connected with the dead in traditional Celtic mythology, and in this case Marra and the dust-wife quite literally descend through a passage deep into the earth. The mortals trapped in this realm are as much lost souls as the ones in the blistered lands—though rather than divinely cursed with insanity, they are magically enchanted into mindless subservience. Marra makes a bargain to rescue one such lost soul, the disgraced knight Fenris, and pledges that someday she’ll come back to rescue more. That Marra manages to not only descend into but also return from two different underworlds—and bring a rescued inhabitant out with her—ought to add two additional tallies to her repertoire of impossible tasks. 

If you like fantasy worlds that explore the darker sides of legends and folklore and damsels in distress who rescue themselves and others, be sure to check out Nettle & Bone. You can find it on shelves now at your favorite local retailer, or order it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you’ve already read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments!