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emilyrainsford's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
medium-paced
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
He prefaced this story as he'd done every other time he told it, by acknowledging its more questionable narrative turns. 'For this story to reach your heart, son, you may need to swallow it down with a sprinkling of salt… You should write the facts of this story only on tissue paper. But you should carve its meaning in stone.'
This is a fairytale. But don't let that give you the wrong idea. Have you read the original fairytales? Those things were dark as fuck and so is this.
It honestly got a bit much for me after a while - trauma after trauma piled on this young girl. It was around the point where she's forced to dig up her own mother's skeleton, and then finds her father's dismembered body, that my inner landscape started to consist mainly of that gif where that guy is just looking at the camera saying sincerely, "Stop. Get some help."
I'd call this novel "genre defying". Don't let the pretty flowers on the cover fool you. It veers into the bizarre and macabre as often as it does the literary and hopeful. Perhaps more often. I honestly feel like Dalton has missed his calling as a horror writer.
This book felt quite bleak to me. I didn't really find it hopeful or uplifting. But I think the frequent mentions of Shakespeare's tragedies - Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet - serve as a reminder that not all stories are happy ones. Sometimes a tragedy is just a tragedy.
I felt like the scene where Tom Berry is telling the pub a tale was a parallel for the experience of reading this story. Dalton is spinning a yarn around the campfire. But where does story and truth intersect... maybe that's up to the listener to decide.
I think, for me, above all, this was a love story. But not the way that might make you think. It was Molly and Greta's love story. Because there is no love on earth like that between a child and a mother - even if that love was born in hearts not bellies.
Dalton's writing is undoubtedly singular and superlative - I think even better than BSU. But this one felt heavier to me. Let's face it, I'd probably read the blurb on a pack of bog rolls if Dalton wrote it. But ngl, I wouldn't be complaining if the next one *wasn't* about a traumatised 12 year old child.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Child abuse, Death, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Gun violence, Grief, Physical abuse, Toxic relationship, and Violence
Moderate: Alcoholism, Child death, and Rape
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