Reviews with content warning for Toxic relationship - Juniper & Thorn

I didn't love it. Juniper and Thorn is dark, gory, horny, and bloody. The real-time, stream-of-conscious narration of Marlinchen's unhappy thoughts at times can be exhausting and hard to read.

It is set in the same universe as The Wolf and the Woodsman, but the only things shared between the books that I noticed were the presence of the Yehuli and one mention of Patricians.

Marlinchen's talent for flesh divining felt like it got dropped completely after the early chapters. At the beginning, Marlinchen can barely stand to touch anyone because she immediately is thrust into visions of their life. Later in the book, this is dropped entirely.

There are some pretty backwards ideas of virginity, mostly as important plot points but they make for some truly rough, gross sentences (ex Marlinchen thinking about licking her own blood "to see what my broken maidenhead tasted like")

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studydniowka's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

I picked out this book because of Ava Reid’s TikToks about it. She presented it as very gore, violent and intense. That’s why I expected something extraordinarily dark, it was not. It’s not a bad book but for me it was not scary at all, mysterious yes, macabre yes but in the end I was not afraid.

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hanna_hllqvist's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful 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? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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rdmoreland0801's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
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

4.0

I don’t know how I feel about this book…. I don’t typically go for such dark themes, but I think I liked it? It was written very well overall, although I think some things went right over my head.

Marlinchen is the youngest of three sisters, daughters of the last wizard of Oblya - Zmiy Vaschenko. Marlinchen believes in all the stories in her father’s codex and her life is beginning to unfold as one.

As she begins to fall in love with Sevas, Marlinchen begins to unravel her father’s secrets and lies. After 23 years trapped inside the house she was born in, she’s finally managed to escape his grasp. Together, Marlinchen and Sevas work to rid the world of Zmiy and discover who Marlinchen truly is.

This is a very dark tale with mentions of sexual assault, mutilation, eating disorders, and abuse. This story is a good representation of women being treated as property. The father is truly possessive and wants his daughters to remain “unspoiled” so that he may be the only one who could. No man wants a spoiled woman. It further promotes the idea that a woman’s value is tied to her “purity”.

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rageofcaliban's review against another edition

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dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

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bi_n_large's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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ameliabee33's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

There really isn't a heroine in this book, because Marlinchen is really a victim. This isn't a heroic fairytale where a knight comes to save the damsel in distress, but instead highlights the abuse that Marlinchen faces at the hands of her father and two sisters. Marlinchen is a daughter to caves to her wizard father as he has a hunger for everything and it never sated. Her sisters, Undine and Rose, do not undergo the mental and verbal abuse the same as Marlinchen and instead let it happen throughout the book, and are sometimes complacent in it. Marlinchen breaks from the cell that is her home and meats Sevas, the principal dancer at the ballet company in Oblya. Together Sevas and Marlinchen bond together due to their shared, horrific traumas and find love in one another. Meanwhile there is a murderous creature about that only eats the victims' livers/hearts and plucks out their eyes.

This story was uncomfortable for me, personally to read. It made me uncomfortable to read it- so please read the trigger warnings before delving in (I did not and it is my fault)!!! I'm not saying that Reid is not a good author, they did a great job at writing out these horrific, dark events that made me want to barf and run away from the book- really like the real Grimms fairytales. This story just didn't do it for me, I didn't enjoy reading it, but like I said it wasn't for lack of the author's skill, or writing (which is very good), it is just me.

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meltingpages's review against another edition

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challenging dark slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

I really enjoyed The Wolf and the Woodsman which I read in July 2021. However, Juniper and Thorn just didn’t work as well for me. I struggled to read this one, and in fact I put it down for months until I decided that I really needed to finish my ARC to finally write a review.

This is a very slow-moving book and there really isn’t a lot of plot, mainly just a lot of abuse and the main character feeling unworthy. The writing was also way more stylistic in this than in the first book, to the point where half the time I had no idea if magic was real or just a metaphor. In fact, there was quite a bit of this that was just metaphor.

I also really did not connect with the characters, and that’s something that I need in my books in order to enjoy them. They don’t necessarily need to be likable, but I do like to understand their thoughts, feelings, and motivation.

With this book being set in the same world as The Wolf and the Woodsman, there is no explanation to the social structure within this book so it’s almost a requirement to read her other book in order to fully understand the world this is set in. Throw in the fact that it’s been over a year since I read The Wolf and the Woodsman and I don’t remember much about this world. With this being a standalone set in the same world, there should’ve been more world building present in this book.

There is also a mystery of a monster killing people in the town, but there is nothing really going on with that until the very end and it was just kind of thrown in as a semblance of a plot. If someone were to ask me what exactly this book is about, I don’t even know if I would be able to describe it other than trauma and a little bit of a slapped together mystery. The first line of the synopsis also mentions the curse, and that really was just an excuse for the father to abuse all three of his daughters. I also found myself questioning if the curse was real or if the father just used it specifically to abuse his daughters.

I know from browsing through Goodreads that the author took her experiences as an abuse survivor as inspiration, I just don’t think that the execution was the best and I just couldn’t get on board with this because it was so hard for me to follow along with. because of the overly flowery writing. This entire book is trauma after trauma and can be VERY triggering so if you are going to read this, keep that in mind. Do I feel terrible that the author went through abuse? Absolutely, but that doesn’t mean I think this was a good book just because of that.

As a warning, all the relationships in this book are toxic, a lot of scenes are pretty graphic. There are graphic sex scenes, killing and dismembering of a creature (animal death), plenty of murder, cannibalism, gore and body horror, child sexual abuse and incest, antisemitism, tons of gaslighting and abuse by family members, self-harm and suicidal thoughts, bulimia with some graphic descriptions, pedophilia, sex trafficking, and also a scene including bestiality. These trigger warnings were not present in the copy that I read, and I believe a few of these were missing from the comments on Goodreads that I think would be helpful.

This just really was not a book for me and unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy reading it.

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