GennaRose Nethercott's Thistlefoot
So I am definitely the target audience for this book, which is about a pair of siblings with mysterious abilities who inherit a house—but if I tell you their last name is Yaga, can you guess what house it is? And if having a living house with chicken legs isn’t enough, a creepy dude who can inspire fear and hatred is hunting it down. Nethercott takes the Baba Yaga stories and explicitly makes them Jewish, weaving in Yiddish folktales and Jewish history in a really interesting way. And even though pogroms were mentioned several times, I was still surprised as how dark/grim this got (not just pogrom-related). I’m not sure the climactic scene totally worked, and some of the characters felt a little underbaked (the secondary characters felt like movie characters, where it’d be enough development for a two hour thing but I want a little more in a novel), but I liked the end a lot and I especially liked the whole VIBE here, if you know what I mean. A/A-.
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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in September.
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