Book #58 of 2019:

The Sisters of the Winter Wood by Rena Rossner

This tale of two Jewish girls discovering their magical heritage in early 20th-century Moldova is a messy debut novel, and I wish it had better integration of its various parts. It’s both a retelling of the Christina Rossetti poem “Goblin Market” (far more closely than Seanan McGuire’s novella In an Absent Dream, published soon after) and a fictionalized account of the pogroms that swept the Slavic region of that time in a fever of blood libel, the false belief that Jews were ritually murdering Christian children. It also incorporates traditional folklore from the area about humans who can turn into bears, with nods to classical myths like Leda and the Swan as well.

That’s a lot of different demands that author Rena Rossner has placed on the narrative, and although I enjoy most of these threads individually, I’m not sure they weave together quite as neatly as they could. The story is most outstanding for its #ownvoices elements that draw on Rossner’s family history in the setting, and if you can handle a book that’s perhaps trying to do a bit too much at once, this is another worthy addition to the burgeoning genre of Judaic fantasy.

Side note: Other reviews mention that for some reason, one heroine’s chapters are all presented in the form of free verse lines of about eight words each. In the audiobook, these are read as typical sentences, with no indication of that formatting choice, so if you find it difficult on the page, I encourage you to listen to the novel instead. Although I do wish the audio narrator had given the girls regional accents like every other voiced character, rather than making the bizarre choice of reading them in British RP.

[Content warning for antisemitism and Jewish hostility towards converts (both called out by the text), discussion of rape, negative body image / internalized fat-shaming, and female characters ending up unexpectedly naked in front of men.]

★★★★☆