A review by ergative
The Forest of a Thousand Eyes by Frances Hardinge

5.0

This was just beautiful. I confess that the ARC ebook I received from Netgalley had very poor rendering of the illustrations, so probably this book is best appreciated in hard copy, but even with just the text I was enchanted. In a very short space, Hardinge has constructed a world in which an ever-hungry Forest has overpowered humanity's attempts to keep it back, until all that remains is the wreck of a Wall that was built, and which failed. Possibly the failure reflected internal human divisions, or perhaps its failure was inevitable, but as it is now, all that is left is pockets of humanity, some of whom believe that they are all that remains, and treat travellers as hungry ghosts. Into this world, our heroine, Feather, sets off, in pursuit of a thief who has taken something valuable from her own pocket of survivors, and in the process discovers what remains of the people in this world, and helps construct a way forward.