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A review by sarahmsklar8
Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery by Brom
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
5.0
Slewfoot affirms my unabashed love for Brom. He masterfully writes gore, violence, and injustice, intricately laced with beauty, and love. He pays homage to Paganism with enough of the superficial details to capture the "horror" but outweighs it with the respect by ultimately showing the deep-rooted morality behind the beliefs.
I love style of storytelling here, it was almost like a fairy tale.... very reminiscent of Grimms. I think I might adapt to pass on all of Brom's stories to my children as bedtime stories only to pass on the copies of his books when they are older.
Slewfoot is ultimately the tale of two sides of the same coin. We have characters that struggle with wanting to be and do good, yet strive to be honor their truest selfs.
Abitha has to be one of my favorite characters in all of literature. She is strong-willed and headstrong, lewd and abrasive, kind and empathetic. She struggles to minimize herself to fit into societies standards of the Puritan town she has been thrust into. She is sold off to be married in a new world but fights to make the best of it. She shows empathy and truly cares for her husband, and despite being forced into the marriage, she truly tries to help him be true to himself and stand up for himself. When faced with Samson, she saw his internal struggle and offered everything she could to help him see light. She constantly tried to help others find their voice without ever compromising her own. That's what I loved most about her.
Samson was a flawed and an incredibly human character for me, which I love to say as he is giant goat-like demon/god. His internal battle of good vs evil, to be loved or feared, to find himself through finding his past was incredibly conflicting and entirely relatable. I love characters that struggle to find this balance. The ones that can give you the world just to hear you laugh, but will also, literally, rip out the guts of a person if he feels like doing so. He was perfectly morally grey.
I felt like some of the characters could have used a bit more of a back story for me to be fully invested in them. The wildfolk and the Pequot have a complex history, and I would sell my soul to get that in a book. While we got a glipse of Forest's motives, there is so much more there and how Sky and Creek fit in would be such a complex and interesting tale.
I love style of storytelling here, it was almost like a fairy tale.... very reminiscent of Grimms. I think I might adapt to pass on all of Brom's stories to my children as bedtime stories only to pass on the copies of his books when they are older.
Slewfoot is ultimately the tale of two sides of the same coin. We have characters that struggle with wanting to be and do good, yet strive to be honor their truest selfs.
Abitha has to be one of my favorite characters in all of literature. She is strong-willed and headstrong, lewd and abrasive, kind and empathetic. She struggles to minimize herself to fit into societies standards of the Puritan town she has been thrust into. She is sold off to be married in a new world but fights to make the best of it. She shows empathy and truly cares for her husband, and despite being forced into the marriage, she truly tries to help him be true to himself and stand up for himself. When faced with Samson, she saw his internal struggle and offered everything she could to help him see light. She constantly tried to help others find their voice without ever compromising her own. That's what I loved most about her.
Samson was a flawed and an incredibly human character for me, which I love to say as he is giant goat-like demon/god. His internal battle of good vs evil, to be loved or feared, to find himself through finding his past was incredibly conflicting and entirely relatable. I love characters that struggle to find this balance. The ones that can give you the world just to hear you laugh, but will also, literally, rip out the guts of a person if he feels like doing so. He was perfectly morally grey.
I felt like some of the characters could have used a bit more of a back story for me to be fully invested in them. The wildfolk and the Pequot have a complex history, and I would sell my soul to get that in a book. While we got a glipse of Forest's motives, there is so much more there and how Sky and Creek fit in would be such a complex and interesting tale.