Each year, Sirens chair Amy Tenbrink posts monthly reviews of new-to-her books from the annual Sirens reading list. You can find all of her Sirens Book Club reviews at the Sirens Goodreads Group. We invite you to read along and discuss!

What do you think it is about fairy tales?

Are we taught to like them, do you think? Taught to think they’re important? Taught to think that, even with magical pumpkins and glass slippers, your window to snare your one true love is fleeting? That even if you give up your voice and spend your days walking on knives, a short-lived affair is reasonable recompense? That you might be curious, but if you’re too curious, death awaits. Fairy tales: where you really do start someone’s daughter, only to grow into someone’s wife and, if you’re lucky, someone’s mother. Except that you aren’t really lucky, are you? Because your husband will probably abandon your kids to a witch, who — in the grand tradition of powerful women everywhere — will obviously eat them.

As Sirens discussed at length in 2012, we — as women and non-binary people — spend a lot of time re-claiming our stories. Remembering that, in early versions, a gaggle of wise women saved Little Red from the wolf. Restructuring tales so that women’s power isn’t unusual or bad or based on chomping children. So that we have options other than being meekly grateful for our dowry as we’re married off to murderers. So that we have a role in life other than attempting to redeem our fathers’ failures.

Ugh. What do you think it is about fairy tales?

As I sit down to write this, I wonder: How many fairy tales do I really love? How many retellings? How many reclamations? Perhaps The Little Mermaid, in its Andersen form, where abandoning yourself for a dude you’ve only seen, only to wind up sea foam when he casts you aside for another, seems like maybe how things go. Maybe Dark Triumph, Robin LaFevers’ almost unrecognizable Beauty and the Beast, where Beauty is, by many measures, more terrifying than the beast. Definitely Mr. Fox, by Helen Oyeyemi, where a bro writer’s fed-up female muse makes him retell Bluebeard over and over and over again.

Which is, perhaps, the long way of saying that I’m a fairy-tale skeptic. To me, they feel like more of the patriarchy: something cautionary, punishing, limiting. Something that tells girls to be good, to be kind, to behave. That if you stay on the path, and out of the forbidden room, and you just give up your voice, you’ll get your familial reward.

And then, here we are: The Girl Who Drank the Moon, Kelly Barnhill’s both familiar and not-so-much fairy tale.

It must be hard to write original fairy tales, don’t you think? Something that feels both comfy and wondrous. Something that resounds with all the import that we’ve assigned to fairy tales over the years, with gravitas, with profundity. And yet something that delights. Something that takes something so very patriarchal and transforms it into something feminist, inclusive, empathetic. How Sisyphean.

And yet, Barnhill does it. The Girl Who Drank the Moon is breathtaking: both original and reclaimed, both philosophical and whimsical, always compulsively readable.

In The Girl Who Drank the Moon, the Protectorate is a Puritan-ish society. A group of men — not necessarily white, but neither clearly not-white — runs the show: they boss everyone around, skim money off the trading, and oh yes, once a year, sacrifice the youngest child in the village to a witch — a witch that the bloody jerks don’t think exists. They purportedly made her up to terrify the villagers, and they just sort of assume that a wild animal eats the baby every year.

But there is a witch. Her name is Xan, and she has no idea why these great idiots leave a baby in the woods every year, but every year, she collects the baby and delivers it to a family on the other side of the woods, feeding it starlight across the way. How lovely is that?

Until whoops, Xan accidentally feeds one baby moonlight instead of starlight, which enmagicks the baby. Xan keeps this baby, naming her Luna, and raises her as both granddaughter and nascent witch — or rather a village raises her: Xan, a friendly swamp monster, and a perfectly tiny dragon.

So much of this story is about growing up and growing older: how children see things differently, how the older generation steps aside (or doesn’t) for the younger, how much puberty sucks, how memory can trick you or fail, how time runs out. And, of course, this story is about concrete things, too: A volcano. Seven-league boots. A woman with a tiger’s heart. A boy who thinks sacrificing babies is horrible. A girl afraid of nothing. A story told all wrong.

The Girl Who Drinks the Moon is the sort of fairy tale I wish I’d had growing up: one where women are powerful and monsters are kind and growing up is hard and the right person saying the right thing at the right time can change the world.

Amy
 

 
Amy Tenbrink spends her days handling content distribution and intellectual property transactions for an entertainment company. Her nights and weekends over the last twenty years have involved managing a wide variety of events, including theatrical productions, marching band shows, sporting events, and interdisciplinary conferences. Most recently, she has organized three Harry Potter conferences (The Witching Hour, in Salem, Massachusetts; Phoenix Rising, in the French Quarter of New Orleans; and Terminus, in downtown Chicago) and seven years of Sirens. Her experience includes all aspects of event planning, from logistics and marketing to legal consulting and budget management, and she holds degrees with honors from both the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music and the Georgetown University Law Center. She likes nothing so much as monster girls, Weasleys, and a well-planned revolution.

Each year, Sirens chair Amy Tenbrink posts monthly reviews of new-to-her books from the annual Sirens reading list. You can find all of her Sirens Book Club reviews at the Sirens Goodreads Group. We invite you to read along and discuss!

It has taken me seven days to realize that the reason that I can’t find my way into this book review is because I couldn’t find my way into this book. Which is not to say that I didn’t like this book. Like, really like it. Because I did.

And thus began the world’s most conflicted book review ever.

I don’t, usually, love books unreservedly. I’m generally a quite critical reader, and I rarely find books where I don’t struggle with something: plot, world-building, characters, magical systems, pacing, logic, cliff-hangers, something.

But I do, quite commonly, love pieces of books: a character, a fictional political system, surprise plot twists, a beautifully crafted narrative voice. And I, also quite commonly, extrapolate love for the entire book from love for pieces of the book. Does that make any sense? I really love The House of Shattered Wings, despite that I loathe books about angels, because of how de Bodard handles colonialism in an alt-reality fantasy book. I love The Rabbit Back Literature Society, despite its so-very-vague ending, because of my great love of basically everything else in that book. I love Throne of Glass, despite its overwhelming YA sparkliness, because Assassin Barbie is all that. And I love Silver on the Road, despite its molasses pacing, because being the Devil’s Left Hand is that interesting to me.

Which is to say, through a rather circuitous route, that as long as I can find something about a book that I love – a way in, if you will – I often love the book itself.

But I don’t think that I’ve ever before loved a book when I didn’t love any of its pieces. Enter Three Dark Crowns.

Three Dark Crowns is the incomparable Kendare Blake’s first foray into high fantasy. Many of you will remember Kendare from Sirens in 2014, when she was a Guest of Honor and I made everyone read Anna Dressed in Blood because I heart it so.

Three Dark Crowns takes place on Fennbirn, an island protected from the mainland by mysterious mist, an island whose people have magic, an island that crowns magical queens once every sixteen years. But Fennbirn’s traditions are so much more than that: Every generation, the then-current queen bears triplets, all girls, all magical: one a poisoner, one a naturalist, one an elemental. Upon birth, the queen cedes her right to the island, and leaves, with her king-consort (never king, always king-consort), to live happily ever after (or whatever) on the mainland. Meanwhile, her daughters are raised separately, within the seats of their respective power on Fennbirn – and when they turn sixteen, will spend the year trying to kill each other to take the crown.

Yes, you read that right: sixteen-year-old sisters are raised to kill each other. No, Three Dark Crowns doesn’t really explain why that is the case.

We open, of course, on the sisters’ sixteenth birthday, four months before Beltane, when the killing can start. And you spend the first 180 pages on, basically, world-building and character development. You meet Katharine, a poisoner, whose gift is weak, but who is expected to take the crown for the poisoner line that has held it for a century. Her training, especially given her weakness, is thinly veiled abuse and readers might have a hard time with her chapters. Then you meet Arsinoe, a naturalist, whose animal familiar refuses to appear – but whose best friend (with her cougar familiar) is the most powerful naturalist in over half a century. Finally, you meet Mirabella, an astonishingly powerful elemental, who is controlled by the Temple, Fennbirn’s priestesses who want, in equal parts, to stop the poisoner control of the island and put in place a queen who will do their bidding. The presumption, as Three Dark Opens is that Mirabella will easily dispatch her sisters to claim the crown.

Beginning about page 180, though, the plot thickens. (Or starts. Whatever.) It’s not too much of a spoiler to tell you that a fleeing Mirabella saves Arsinoe’s friend’s boyfriend from drowning – and with that, the first unplanned contact between the players in this toxic game, things become a lot more interesting. Murder isn’t allowed yet, but positioning, gamesmanship, and misunderstood communications certainly are.

So here’s the thing about Three Dark Crowns: The world-building, magical systems, and politics were opaque, the characters were mostly boring and dithering, the pacing was ridiculously slow, the book has three main point-of-view characters so it took a long time to learn to care about any of them, the book probably needed a good edit for metaphors, and the bloody thing ends on a cliffhanger.

BUT. Somehow, improbably, I loved it anyway. I think because Kendare, in many ways more than a lot of authors that I read, takes risks that I respect. She built a world in which powerful women kill each other for a throne – regularly, as part of a tradition, a beloved tradition. She built women who are unlikeable, who make stupid decisions, who fail and pick themselves back up and try again. She made poison, of all things, a magical trait. She wrote a suffocating book that, simply because it’s about deadly women with ambition seeking power, has something remarkable to say.

And not to spoil things too much, but by the end of this book, when these women finally do find both their power and their resolve, Kendare hooked me for round two: One Dark Throne.

Amy
 

 
Amy Tenbrink spends her days handling content distribution and intellectual property transactions for an entertainment company. Her nights and weekends over the last twenty years have involved managing a wide variety of events, including theatrical productions, marching band shows, sporting events, and interdisciplinary conferences. Most recently, she has organized three Harry Potter conferences (The Witching Hour, in Salem, Massachusetts; Phoenix Rising, in the French Quarter of New Orleans; and Terminus, in downtown Chicago) and seven years of Sirens. Her experience includes all aspects of event planning, from logistics and marketing to legal consulting and budget management, and she holds degrees with honors from both the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music and the Georgetown University Law Center. She likes nothing so much as monster girls, Weasleys, and a well-planned revolution.

Each year, Sirens chair Amy Tenbrink posts monthly reviews of new-to-her books from the annual Sirens reading list. You can find all of her Sirens Book Club reviews at the Sirens Goodreads Group. We invite you to read along and discuss!

A decade ago, I read the entire Twilight series. The whole thing: the creepy sleep-watching, the blank chapters, the suicide attempts, the imprinting, the popsicle sex. Not because I loved it, because I didn’t. No, I read Twilight because they were zeitgeist books. Millions of women read those books. Millions of girls loved those books. Millions of men (and other women) judged them for it. There were Twi-hards and Twilight conventions and, unlike a lot of series, the entire Twilight series made it into theatrically released movies.

I didn’t really get it. And I don’t really get it now. And while I don’t care so much about not getting it – not everyone loves everything – I often want to understand why, if you will, the zeitgeist. So every year I pick up books that maybe I otherwise wouldn’t read simply because the general public – the not-necessarily-fantasy-loving general public – seems to like them a lot.

Which is why The Witch’s Daughter, by Paula Brackston, made the Sirens Book Club this year. You’ve all seen it. You probably recognize the cover. It’s a New York Times bestseller. It made the tables at the big bookstores. It’s the first in a series. This is one of those books – like Big Little Lies, maybe, or Gone Girl – that was the right book at the right time to capture a lot of readers’ attention. But why?

The Witch’s Daughter is one of those sweeping historical novels: We start in modern-day England, more or less, but then jump back to several periods in England’s history: the witch-burning period, Jack the Ripper, a world war. Those of you looking for historical accuracy, however, should look elsewhere. While Brackston makes some attempt at differences in dialogue in different periods, this isn’t going to make even an armchair historian happy.

The crux of The Witch’s Daughter isn’t history, however; it’s fantasy. We’re in a world where magic is something between a skill and a talent: it’s somewhat unclear, but it seems that a powerful witch can turn anyone with the slightest propensity into a witch, though perhaps not an especially powerful witch, and then if that witch practices, they become more powerful. One of my greatest frustrations with this book is actually that lack of clarity. I couldn’t tell what the criteria are for becoming a witch, why some witches are more powerful than others, or how much more powerful you could become with practice. Which is to say that I spent a lot of this book thinking, “Why don’t you just…?” And, “But what about…?”

Our protagonist, Elizabeth, is both the titular witch’s daughter and a witch herself. She wasn’t born a witch, but we learn relatively early on in the book how she became a witch. SPOILER Back in witch-burning England, the plague came. After losing two children and her husband, Elizabeth’s mother traded God-knows-what to Gideon, an arrogant, power-mad male witch (trigger warning: rape), in exchange for the power to heal Elizabeth. Facing execution for witchcraft and knowing that the hysteria will call for her daughter’s death next, her mother tells Elizabeth to seek out Gideon for protection. Following her mother’s death, Elizabeth does. Gideon teaches Elizabeth magic and, thinking she’ll be his immortal soulmate, makes a deal with the devil to grant Elizabeth great power. (Only in a certain type of book does procuring great magic for your soulmate involve having a threesome with two other women.) Elizabeth witnesses the ritual and, terrified, horrified, she flees.

And spends the next few centuries continuing to flee. The Witch’s Daughter jumps back and forth between modern-day, as Elizabeth meets and then trains local-girl Tegan in witchcraft (or Wiccan; the book doesn’t seem to differentiate between fantastic witchcraft and real-world Wicca, which is obnoxious), and history, as she changes her name and occasionally encounters Gideon (who is, of course, Jack the Ripper). BIGGER SPOILER Eventually, you learn than Tegan’s older boyfriend is also Gideon and that we’re going to have a showdown. A showdown that, ultimately, I found unsatisfying.

Should you read it? I think that ultimately comes down to a couple questions: Do you like reluctant, even passive heroines? Do you love the witch oeuvre so much that you’ll happily read even flawed books? Is it going to drive you insane when Elizabeth doesn’t seem to try very hard to evade or defeat Gideon? Are you going to be mad when Elizabeth reconciles herself to being less powerful than Gideon, even though she’s made very little effort to develop her skill?

I wouldn’t recommend this book to myself. I like my heroines to drive the action, not react to it, and what interests me most about women who work magic is their embrace of power, their ambition, and their willingness to put in the work to augment that power in service of that ambition. Elizabeth isn’t that woman. But there are many, many aspects of women who work magic, and she might be your woman.

Amy
 

 
Amy Tenbrink spends her days handling content distribution and intellectual property transactions for an entertainment company. Her nights and weekends over the last twenty years have involved managing a wide variety of events, including theatrical productions, marching band shows, sporting events, and interdisciplinary conferences. Most recently, she has organized three Harry Potter conferences (The Witching Hour, in Salem, Massachusetts; Phoenix Rising, in the French Quarter of New Orleans; and Terminus, in downtown Chicago) and seven years of Sirens. Her experience includes all aspects of event planning, from logistics and marketing to legal consulting and budget management, and she holds degrees with honors from both the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music and the Georgetown University Law Center. She likes nothing so much as monster girls, Weasleys, and a well-planned revolution.