Nettle & Bone

I really enjoyed this fantasy slash fairy tale quest story about a youngest daughter working to try to free her elder sister from abuse. It has fresh worldbuilding, many characters with depth, multiple older women characters, and ultimately a story about working together to free people from powerful and abusive men.

I think the weakest part of the book was the romance angle for me. It was cute, but I felt like I was missing some extra characterization about "why these two" other than just romance-through-proximity. This was all a bit of a surprise for me, as I quite enjoyed the various T. Kingfisher sad paladin romances. (One could make a good argument that Fenris may as well also be yet another sad paladin, which doesn't help here either.)

That said, I feel like the romance was an exceptionally small part of the book (arguably much smaller than other books in the same genre of story) and so don't let that put you off. I just feel like the story would have been more powerful had there not been as much understated flirting there and they had just been buddies working together to right wrongs (or even some explicit aro or ace angle, which is how I had been reading Marra the rest of the book).

I wouldn't describe this as a comedy book, but there were so many funny moments to the book that I had to hold myself back from posting a dozen quotes. I laughed so hard at the dust-wife's exasperation leading into her third impossible task (and it was such good characterization too). Overall, this was a lot of fun but I also found it to have quite a bit more depth than I was expecting.