Reviews tagging 'Grief'

Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott

50 reviews

mossgoblins's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful mysterious reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This was hands-down the best story I’ve read in years. I might be a bit biased since my family history is not dissimilar to that of the Yaga’s, yet I believe anyone can appreciate the masterwork of GennaRose Nethercott in Thistlefoot. The plot is airtight, the characters complex and endearing, and the setting simply sparkling with life. 

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savvylit's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

"There is no such thing as a ghost of the dead. Yet suffering has a way of begging to be remembered. Sometimes, as a story. Sometimes, as a wraith."

Based on the Slavic folktale of Baba Yaga, Thistlefoot is a beautifully written and heartbreaking dark fairytale. The plot and the characters are compelling and not overly fantastical. Isaac and Bellatine are both perfectly imperfect protagonists with unique magical abilities. Thistlefoot, the house, is an enchanting setting AND a dynamic character all on its own. The Longshadow Man is a horrific antagonist. Hubcap, the cat, is the best character and deserved more love. The Duskbreaker Band members are all quite cool and their backstories are the one thing this novel needed to explore in more depth. Winnie is a delight. And Baba Yaga? She was a badass trying her best.

Beyond the deeply memorable characters and plot, the real power of Thistlefoot lies in its exploration of the legacy of suffering and the way that trauma echoes unseen throughout generations. Alongside Isaac and Bellatine, Nethercott invites readers to recognize the power of remembering historical atrocity. If we don't remember, we can't heal. If we don't remember, we can't honor those who have been lost.

This stunning saga is GennaRose Nethercott's debut novel. At first, this fact surprised me given the many achingly gorgeous passages in the novel. However, prior to Thistlefoot, Nethercott was most well-known for her poetry. Additionally, in the acknowledgments, she cites the prose of Angela Carter and Ray Bradbury as inspiration. That inspiration and her clear poetic skill both shine through so vividly in the magical, devastating world that Nethercott has created in Thistlefoot. I won't soon forget the Yaga family story.

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victoriousbookworm's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional slow-paced

4.5


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abominablesnowaro's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0


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hngisreading's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful reflective sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0


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maregred's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful informative mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0


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morganpearcy's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

This book grabs your attention right away with a completely different approach to the Baba Yaga myth and magical realism. I was totally taken from the second chapter. It does get slow in the middle, but it’s worth it to keep reading because the conclusion to the story is so good and horrific and sad. This book will wreck you. 

It bears noting in the review that if you have birth trauma or child death trauma you shouldn’t read this book. 

I absolutely adored the interweaving of Baba Yaga into recent history and the magical realism that allowed it to happen. I think some folx might be agitated that things like shapeshifting and a house on chicken legs and the ability to reanimate the dead don’t receive more visceral responses in the book from onlookers. But I felt that the author did a good job of setting the stage that these kinds of strange events and magical abilities exist in the world and are oddities approached with curiosity rather than so rare that it would cause like a crowd or a burning at the stake like. :)  The author does a phenomenal job of exploring the horror of these magical abilities in great detail. 

This book deals with a lot of terrible, hard topics. It explores through the re-imagining of the Baba Yaga myth: the holocaust, intergenerational trauma, how the body keeps score and how remembering keeps stories alive. I found the intergenerational trauma pieces to be so true - what we’re discovering now with epigentics is that trauma up to 4 generations past shows up in our bodies in all sorts of forms. This book even explores that. It also explores how true history really has to be kept because you can erase cultures and people and in turn perpetuate violence by erasing their stories. Very applicable to what’s going on today in the US with CRT and book censorship.

I REALLY loved the lesbian love story - it’s not overly erotic or sex and attraction focused, it’s believable and just fits the story. It’s also not the focus which I appreciated a great deal. I squealed at multiple points in delight at the little lesbian budding relationship which really just contributed to the character development as the two involved learned about themselves. 

My favorite quotes, which I love so much I had to write down: 

“There is no such thing as a ghost of the dead. Yet suffering has a way of begging to be remembered, sometimes as a story, sometimes as a wraith. Today they say the air in what used to be Gedenkrovka is heavier than it should be. So altered, it presses damp on the skin. They say pain can be passed in the blood. A sorrow great enough can alter an ancestral line - can make itself visible in the body even generations later - even once the name of the sorrow is forgotten. How long does it take for the body to realize it is safe? Does it ever? Can a restlessness be a ghost? Can a pair of hands? There are no ghosts of the dead. Your grandfather does not sit at the foot of your bed and sing. Do not be stupid. You do not see a child in a Victorian gown by the window. These are mirages or devils. The dybbuk possessing your husband is simply his anger mixed with drink. There are no ghosts of the dead. And yet, this is a ghost story. There are no ghosts of the dead. But events? Events, if they carry enough wailing can leave a mark. Can squeeze themselves into terrible shapes, grow arms, legs, a head on which to wear a hat, feet on which to follow you. Events — they have a way of coming back.” from chapter 27

“I will ask you these: What happens when the walls we raise outlive the dangers they were built to keep out? At what point does a fort become a cage?” from Chapter 49

Be prepared with tissues. Lots of tissues. At the end. This is easily in my top 3 Baba Yaga books so far. I am tempted to give it 4⭐️ simply because of all the damned fucking tissues I went through and was not anticipating. But it’s too good for that. 

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booksdogsandcoffee's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring lighthearted mysterious sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

From the first few paragraphs of Thistlefoot I knew it was going to be one of my favorite reads on 2022. 

The best way to describe this book is a modern day folklore retelling of Baba Yaga’s descendants. It is about how stories are made and told. How stories can never die, how each generation keeps the stories and myths of old alive. It is a hauntingly beautiful story of two estranged siblings who find each other again, find themselves and confront their generational trauma. 

Some of my favorite things about Thistlefoot are 1) the house, Thistlefoot, has its own pov. They are telling you about themself and the many stories and myths of their origin. 2) Isaac Yaga, one of the two Yaga siblings, is Jewish and he has migraines. I rarely see migraine representation in books, especially paired with Jewish representation and to see that part of myself represented brought tears to my eyes. 3) The writing of this book is literal magic. The way Nethercott describes the setting, characters, events that are happening is phenomenal. 

The in-depth look at generational trauma, a love of theater and the importance of family is just perfect. On the whole I couldn’t love this book more and I highly highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone. 

Tropes & themes
Found family
Traveling theater 
Ancestral trauma 

Rep 
Jewish
Sapphic

Cw
Eugenics 
Anti-Semitism 
Death of a Child
Immigration 
Death
Violence
Gore 
Blood

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beforeviolets's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Reading this book felt like a part of my own soul was carved out of my depths and projected on the page in front of me. I imagine the horror I feel is not unlike the way someone who has only ever seen themself through a reflection must feel when they see themself in a photograph for the first time. A knowing and unknowing.

Thistlefoot tells the story of the Yaga siblings, estranged for many years after growing up together in a family puppet theater. But they find themselves reunited by a phone call, informing them of an inheritance: a house on chicken legs called Thistlefoot, they turn their new home into a traveling puppet theatre, on a cross-country road trip to perform a show from their youth. But little do they know that their past is haunting them in more ways than one.

GennaRose has written a love letter to folklore and its ever-changing nature, to puppetry and the power of performance, to generational trauma and the importance of history retold, and to storytelling both as an art and as an act of resistance.

Despite its characters’ innate inability to do so, this book plants roots. Like a forest, there’s a whole system of wooden tendrils beneath its surface, burrowed between the pages, stretching back to the past and reaching towards the future. A whole life tangling beneath your (metaphorical) feet. Its themes, its characters, its plotlines interconnect in ways that only begin to break the surface. Each begotten fruit, each unfurled blossom the product of a history and a future unseen, a gift to the reader as we make our way through the complex, snarling terrain of this world and its many unfolding tales.

I unfortunately cannot begin to break down the many amazing element of this book or we'll be here for ages, so let me just quickly list some of my favorite things: a sentient house with its own POV that talks like a Jewish grandmother, an interwoven puppetry show, Baba Yaga as a protective and strong Jewish woman in a Russian shtetl, a new twist on the golem myth paired with conversations about control and life itself, maybe the weirdest sapphic relationship I've ever read, a nonbinary scientist, lavender cigarettes, a joke about Stanislavsky, the concept of ghost as memory (THE CONCEPT OF GHOST AS MEMORY!!), and a dissection of modern American folklore.

This book is for all those who have spent so long looking into the distance, they’ve forgotten where their path began. (And for Jewish puppeteers.) Kill the lantern. Raise the ghost.

CW/TW: antisemitism, genocide, eugenics, violence, gun violence, fire, death, child death, character death, grief, PTSD, murder, drugging, alcohol consumption, blood & gore, smoking, self-inflicted harm, migraines, racism, car accident, adult/minor relationship (kinda?), emesis, needles (brief), cannibalism (mention), decapitation (mention)

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zoeelizabethk's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Thistlefoot was simultaneously what I want out Russian fairy-tale-inspired books, and also not what I expected. I think that this is a book that will hit really powerfully for some and be super annoying to others. I think that it's best to go in with as little context as possible and to suspend your disbelief. But also be prepared for a book that is worthwhile to read and well crafted, but also not entirely enjoyable. This is not a disney fairytale, this is a Grimms' original, cut off your foot to fit in the slipper, type of fairytale. It deals with hard things, but I think in the end it does its topics justice.

Most of this book is positives for me. I think the narrative structure of Thistlefoot is brilliant. I can't say too much because of spoilers, but the way different stories are broken up and told opposite and in front and in back of each other is well done. If you have any familiarity with slavic fairytales it will feel familiar but also clever. I also loved the prose and the narrative tone of the book. Nethercott is also a poet, and that definitely comes across in her writing. It's very suited to a liminal fairy tale. I really liked the discussion of the power of story, remembrance, and generational memory. I wrote my college thesis on Russian generational memory surrounding WWII, so it's a topic that I've spent a good amount of time with, and I thought that Thistlefoot was a really good vehicle to explore that topic.

The few negatives for me that I noticed, but didn't necessarily impact my enjoyment of the book. Occasionally the prose got a little unwieldy in my opinion and the book could have been shorter. I thought the minor romance that develops came out of nowhere and did nothing; I'm not sure that it even served as a plot device. I think there's good development for Isaac and Bellantine, but don't expect the side characters to be really well fleshed out. I thought they were sufficient for this story, but this might bother character driven readers. The settings felt often very vague despite seeming vivid to the characters. It was very hard to remind myself that this was taking place in modern day. Finally, I think the ending was probably the right choice thematically, but it was not necessarily satisfying, particularly for our characters. 

Overall, I am really glad I read Thistlefoot. I'm looking forward to what Nethercott comes up with next, because I really appreciated what she created here. If you are a fan of slavic folklore/fairy tales, I think that this is definitely worth picking up. The blub likens it to Spinning Silver, and I don't disagree, but I think it is more similar to Deathless by Catherynne Valente. If you enjoyed Deathless, Spinning Silver, or the Winternight Trilogy (which I had serious problems with), give Thistlefoot a try!

Thanks to Netgalley and Anchor Books for an eARC in exchange for my honest review. I also listened to the audiobook narrated by January LaVoy, who overall had a terrific narration.

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