Nettle & Bone

I loved this. It's an adventure story but the quest isn’t to save the world (which gets tiresome after a while). This is a fairy tale that follows the series of actions and decisions that a woman takes to free her sister from an abusive husband.

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“Do they believe in hell, up here?”
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“They do,” Marra said. “You freeze in eternal cold.” She shook her head. The concept had seemed foreign to her when she heard it.

The Harbor Kingdom, sensibly, believed that the dead went into the sea, and the good were reborn from it, while the damned sank to the bottom and were devoured by crabs. Still, she couldn’t blame the Northern Kingdom for their confusion. There probably weren’t very many crabs up here.

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There’s plenty of magic, great character building, a romance that isn’t eye-roll inducing (and is never the center of attention), and some scenes and passages are laugh-out-loud funny.

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Bonedog, bored, sat down and began trying to lick his nether regions. Since he had neither tongue nor anything to lick, this accomplished nothing but seemed to please him.

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One thing I particularly liked is that each character has an arc, even the dog made of bones. And that each of the main characters is better off at the end than they were before the adventure began. I loved reading women working together, in whatever ways they could, to help each other.

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“Well, he’s a dog. They don’t have an idea how the world’s supposed to be, so it doesn’t bother them when it isn’t.” Agnes frowned. “Except herding dogs, I think. They have a pretty clear idea in their heads, so they’re always nipping and worrying and trying to get it to fit. Of course, there’s people like that, too.”

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Great stuff! I look forward to reading more of T. Kingfisher's work.