Nettle & Bone

Product Information

The very special hardcover edition features a gold foil stamp on the casing and custom endpapers illustrated by the author.

Marra was aware that this was not a good thing, but the odds of living long enough for infection to kill her were so small that she could not feel much concern. Kingfisher is delivering all the classic Fantasy Quest tropes I adore, while glazing the entire tale with a healthy layer of humor. Seeking help from a powerful gravewitch, Marra is offered the tools to kill a prince - if she can complete three impossible tasks.If they felt that they were safer here than they were outside it, it was not her place to tell them otherwise. T. Kingfisher is the adult fiction pseudonym of Ursula Vernon, the multi-award-winning author of Digger and Dragonbreath. Marra, the main one, is a princess who's not very good at politics; she was sent to a convent, so she's also a nun but not really, as she herself states. The book is beautifully written with some wonderful turns of phrase, several laugh-out moments, some wonderful creepiness, strong characters and some tugs on the heartstrings, all set in a vivid world.

It fit alongside another long bone—not from the same animal, but close enough—and she bound them together and fit them into the framework she was creating. it made for a thoroughly immersive experience, and amara jasper, the audiobook narrator, really brought each character to life with different voices, intonations, and emotions all coming across in her expressive voice.

we are following the youngest princess to a small kingdom who is set out on a quest to free her sister from her abusive husband. her eldest, and favorite, sister damia is married off to prince vorling, forging an alliance between his kingdom and their family's smaller and more vulnerable city-state. she seeks a powerful gravewitch - the dust-wife; she weaves a cloak of burning, magicked nettle; she builds a dog of bones; she frees a man from ensorcelled servitude; she enlists the help of a godmother; and she survives a goblin market, a haunted necropolis, a blistered land cursed with cannibals. marra adjusts to the simplicity of a novice's life, and when her sister finally becomes pregnant five years later, she attends the christening of kania's daughter, where she meets vorling for the first time and begins to suspect he was responsible for damia's untimely death, and fears that kania is also in danger, until/unless/after she produces a son. In the beginning, Marra isn't compelling, and the story starts in a way that makes you think it's going to be Horror, and ultimately isn't, which is going to be either a pro or a contra depending on whether you like Horror or not.

This acknowledgement that compromises are necessary "implies gently that maybe we can understand the kinds of calculations Marra’s mother and sister have been making".Caitlyn Paxton of NPR praised the novel for its use of two older female protagonists, Marra and the dust-wife. It's also got a fabulous cast: an aging himbo warrior, a not-so-fairy godmother, a witch of the dead, a demon chicken, and of course, the dog made of bones.

For a moment she had envied them, two people punished through no fault of their own, because they had each other. everyone always just says how this is about a sister getting revenge on a prince who has caused harm to her two older sisters, and that is very true, but this book really goes to dark places and lets you see the horrors humans can be capable of very descriptively - so please use care if you need to! While the story takes plenty of detours on its way to the epic climax, it never feels like a waste of time. On her journey, Marra will be joined not only by the dust-wife, but also by Bonedog, her godmother Agnes, the demon chicken, Fenris, and Finder. Uncle Earl’s Wonder Museum seems like the perfect place for Carrot to recover from her divorce, but maybe not so much.

and agnes, the sweetest godmother who will really make you think about blessings and curses and how kindness can sometimes really go a long way, especially to people who haven’t known much kindness. It consists of a princess, a grumpy witch, a fairy godmother, a soft-hearted killer and a dog made of bones. The brown hen stood on the death mask, which had split in two, looking as serene as only a chicken can look. In my opinion, fall is the perfect season to abandon one's mortal coils for a few hours and cross the threshold of this book, where one will assuredly bear witness to something a little wicked. The trick, for me, was waiting until Marra meets the other characters and the band of misfits is formed.