Book #190 of 2022:
Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott
It’s apparent early on that there are two opposing threads in this story, and while I hoped they would eventually align and synergize, the narrative never really gets there for me. The stronger element is the #ownvoices presentation of Russian Jewish history, specifically concerning the pogroms of the early twentieth century, in conjunction with nods to traditional Judaic folklore of dybbuks, golems, and the like. Then against this backdrop, the weaker main plot includes two modern descendants of Baba Yaga who inherit her wandering chicken-footed house, and the villain who comes after them in search of it.
The latter piece falters in part due to a lack of clear worldbuilding. I don’t entirely mind author GennaRose Nethercott’s decision to move the fabled crone forward a few centuries, but both her inclusion and the overall mythic angle of the text sets up an expectation that the Baba Yaga legend itself will matter. Surely, a reader might reasonably think, her great-great-grandchildren will discover their heritage and be astonished! Instead, she turns out to be simply an old woman like any other, who once worked a wonder to transform and animate her home in a moment of severe anguish — a feat we are told vaguely has been attested in other such stressful situations around the world. Her scions do have powers of their own — one sibling to bring smaller inanimate things to life and her brother to flawlessly mimic the mannerisms of anyone he meets — but they are known from the start and likewise not incorporated into any larger conception of how magic is supposed to work here. It’s hard to worry about what might happen next, when there’s never any firm sense of what the rules are.
The characters themselves are also a problem, though. The stakes against them seem fairly meaningless, since all the bad guy wants to do is destroy the house they just found out about, and he’s too flat an antagonist to take seriously, even after the explanatory late reveal of his true nature. And beyond escaping him and keeping the hut safe, what do our protagonists even desire for themselves? Well, one is mostly trying to ignore his guilt over a dead friend (misplaced, in my opinion), while his sister is angsty about her attraction to a statue she ensorcelled and worried that the formerly-stone girl is being forced by the spell to reciprocate her affections.
In other words, these are all pretty petty and juvenile concerns that a good conversation could probably clear up, and the dramatic crux of the novel involves basically just that, along with the overdue and perfunctory answers about their ancestor. I hate how negative this sounds, because I could tell how the debut writer had poured her heart into the historical sections even before I saw an interview mentioning her own family’s experience with antisemitism in the region. And I would still call it a good book overall: a 3-star “I liked it” on the Goodreads scale. But the better parts are severely undermined by the framework around them.
★★★☆☆
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