Scan barcode
A review by stevethomas
The Goblin Market by Jennifer Melzer
4.0
The Goblin Market opens with a prologue ripped out of Grimm's Fairy Tales. A girl, wandering away from her boyfriend, stumbles upon a goblin market, where she is tricked into sampling the food. Soon, she is kidnapped by goblins, and it's up to her sister to enter the faerie world to save her.
The fairy tale aspects of the book were wonderful. Everything functions by the same crazy, but somehow coherent logic as it does in the stories you heard as a child. The worldbuilding was well-done, but sparse, although the scarcity of information often added to the mystique of the world. The villain of the novel channeled David Bowie's performance in Labyrinth. On top of that the prose was beautiful.
On the negative side, some of the characters only showed up long enough to leave. My favorite, a boisterous fairy warrior, vanishes from the book in the blink of an eye. Another issue, and this is largely a pet peeve, was the name of the male lead, Him. Seeing "Him" as the subject of a sentence just kept setting off my grammar alarm, and drew me out of the story. It's petty, but it bothered me.
The fairy tale aspects of the book were wonderful. Everything functions by the same crazy, but somehow coherent logic as it does in the stories you heard as a child. The worldbuilding was well-done, but sparse, although the scarcity of information often added to the mystique of the world. The villain of the novel channeled David Bowie's performance in Labyrinth. On top of that the prose was beautiful.
On the negative side, some of the characters only showed up long enough to leave. My favorite, a boisterous fairy warrior, vanishes from the book in the blink of an eye. Another issue, and this is largely a pet peeve, was the name of the male lead, Him. Seeing "Him" as the subject of a sentence just kept setting off my grammar alarm, and drew me out of the story. It's petty, but it bothered me.