First impressions review: Daughter of the Forest, by Juliet Marillier
Back in high school, I read quite a few books that could be classified as “1990s girlboss fantasy retelling”, such as the ‘Mists of Avalon’. Generally, they took some classic legend or fairytale and re-told it from the POV of one of the main female characters, such as Morgan LeFae or Maid Marion. I soon caught on that the feminism was usually kind of superficial, often involving the MC liking sex plus some generic “look how bad sexism was in medieval times” stuff. They could still be a good time, though, especially considering that back then smut, especially of the sex positive, female-focused sort, was harder to access! I kind of expected this book (which I remembered seeing at the time) to be a nostalgic throwback to that, though maybe with more plant lore and less spice than some. Boy, was I wrong! While I generally liked the writing style, and there were moments of both great natural beauty and good narrative tension, overall the pacing was weird, the villains moustache-twirling caricatures, and the romance entirely without chemistry. To top it off, it felt like the author was unnecessarily torturing the main character, Sorcha, including with a graphic sexual assault (plus dog murder) that added basically nothing to the plot! To explain my feelings, I will have to get into spoilers. But first, a bit of background on the source material…
There are many different folktales that involve people being turned into animals as a curse, and their lovers or family members having to go through trials to free them. There are even several that involve swans. Somewhat bizarrely, even though this book is specifically set in Ireland, and there is an Irish version of this tale (‘The Children of Lir’), it is instead clearly based on the German Grimm’s Fairytales version ‘The Six Swans’. ‘The Children of Lir’, on the other hand, canonically exists as a story within the world of the book! They key plot beats of the Grimm fairytale are as follows: A king has six sons and a daughter from his first marriage, but for magical deal reasons must take on a younger wife. He’s worried about her targeting his children, so he hides them away and visits them in secret. The new stepmother finds out and turns the six brothers into swans. The brothers can take human form for only 15 minutes each evening. They tell their sister that to free them she must make six magic shirts spun from nettles, and while she does so she can’t speak for six years, or the spell will never be broken and she will also turn into a swan. She runs away and hides in a hunter’s hut to complete this task. The king of another country finds her and takes her to his court with the intention of marrying her, but his mother doesn’t like this. She steals their three babies after birth and accuses the girl of killing and eating them; since she can’t talk without breaking the spell, she can’t defend herself. She is sentenced to be burned at the stake as a witch, and as she is taken out to be executed the six swans arrive, she throws the shirts over them, and the spell is broken – except for the youngest brother, whose arm remains a wing because the last shirt was missing a sleeve. In the end, it is the wicked mother-in-law who gets burnt.
‘Daughter of the Forest’ sticks fairly closely to this plot, though the kings become an Irish chieftain and a British lord, respectively. I do like that Marillier apparently decided that TWO evil female relatives-by-marriage was too much and made the mother-in-law a reluctant ally and the second villain the love interest’s uncle instead. I also appreciate that there is no implied baby-killing; Sorcha is instead accused of adultery (because she was seen embracing her temporarily-human brother) and sorcery (because why the heck else is she torturing herself with this weird task?). But, good lord, are the villains over-the-top evil! The Lady Oonagh wants to wield influence over the chieftain, and for her children to inherit instead of the original six kids – fine and dandy. But why, if she plans to make them disappear by turning them into swans, does she undertake a number of cruel actions to torture them first, including destroying Sorcha’s herb garden and making one of the brothers injure his own hound? That kind of behavior nearly got her conniving nature found out by the father! Luckily for her, he isn’t the loving, concerned father of the original fairytale…though he does lose his mind with grief later, when it is convenient to cultivate sympathy for him! Uncle Richard similarly raises suspicions in his nephew by sexually harassing Sorcha and having one of his men shoot at a dog she’s fond of (again, potentially undermining his plan for no frickin’ reason!) and then, when he thinks he’s won, monologues worse than a Bond villain. Just pages of telling Sorcha every incriminating thing possible!
It takes a while to get to this plot, though. The first 30 pages are Sorcha telling us what her family and village are like and how she learned herb-craft and so on. Then her father’s men capture a young Briton, Simon, and her youngest brother tells her the boy is being tortured and gets her to help drug the guards so he can sneak him out to their hermit priest friend. And then Sorcha takes care of this guy for a while, trying to help him deal with his PTSD, with limited effects. Only on page 98 does the evil stepmother finally show up! It felt very tedious, considering that I knew from the blurb what the main plot was supposed to be.
The book also ups the difficulty of Sorcha’s task and the amount of suffering she has to endure, for reasons that I don’t quite understand. For starters, spinning with nettle fiber is an actual thing: You can even buy the fibers on Etsy. The stages that would potentially hurt are the harvesting and soaking, but you can avoid the stingers by wearing leather gloves and the fiber itself is no worse to work with than flax or cotton. Well, that was apparently too easy, because Marillier invents a whole plant species - starwort - which stays spiky even after spinning, tearing Sorcha’s hands to shreds and yielding shirts that even an ascetic monk would reject! She doesn’t even have a proper loom or distaff when she starts out. Sorcha justifies why this necessary by saying she must suffer to free her brothers from their suffering. OK, but is being a swan in any way comparable to having your hands bleed for years on end and being in a self-imposed solitary confinement for half of it and unable to speak to anyone for the rest? Marillier really tries to convince us that it is (the brothers, when they become human every 6 months, look increasingly haggard) but no reason is given for why. I could kind of see it for the one brother who partially retains human consciousness, but most people assume it would be relaxing to be an animal that doesn’t have complex human worries! They might be stressed out when they regain human form and realize another 6 months have passed or their family is in danger, but being a swan seems fine. Sorcha keeps worrying about them freezing to death or being eaten by wolves, but A) swans are very long-lived, B) they are migratory, so they can escape the cold, and C) wolves? Girl, wolves can’t fly and aren’t great at swimming, which is why they tend to eat hoofed mammals. Swans are not a major part of the wolf diet!
Which brings me to the rape scene…whoo boy! This pissed me off for so many reasons. First, the graphic nature of it came completely out of left field. Yes, the physical and psychological impacts of Simon’s torture are implied to be similar, but we didn’t have to watch it happen, and the descriptions of his injuries were left vague. Second, this isn’t orchestrated by the villains (the rapists are just some random villagers), and the main narrative purpose is to get her to decide her little cave isn’t safe and go to where she’ll run into her future British husband...which means a close-call would have been sufficient. She has a dog who tries to defend her and is killed in the attempt1. And her brothers see the attack but “Oh, no! We’re swans! There was nothing we could do!” Bullshit. Swans can fuck a human up, and they are very protective of their families – you just suck at being swans, apparently, because you could totally have banded together with the dog to at least distract those dudes enough for Sorcha to escape! Oh, and the reason the rapists find her in the first place is that she’d been spotted by a mentally disabled boy who thinks she’s a fairy. He’s very distressed when the other men attack her and doesn’t join in…but he gets murdered by her brothers anyway when they resume human form. Also rather upsetting! Apparently the author felt that having constantly bleeding hands and not being able to talk to another human being for years on end wasn’t enough suffering for this main character.
What makes this even more egregious is that a big deal is made about how this traumatic event makes it hard for Sorcha to trust men or to picture being intimate with someone. OK, sure; that could be a psychologically interesting challenge for her to overcome. But then she basically goes from hugs only to not being able to get enough of her new husband within like 20 minutes, with only one brief “freeze up2”. And, while we got excruciating level of detail with the rape, these consensual sex scenes just fade to black. WTF? Although…I have to wonder if this is because she’s still only 16 at the end of the book! That means the clearly much older future husband fell for her when she was fourteen. Now, it is historically accurate that 15-16 is considered normal marriageable age in this culture. However, everyone keeps referring to Sorcha as a “girl”, “child”, or “youngster”. Which is it, damn it! Do her contemporaries think a person of her age is a woman who is mature enough to be a wife and mother, or do they think she is a child? Because even a hint of the latter makes this so much creepier!
1. And can I just say, as someone who lost a dog recently: No, Sorcha, the best death for a dog is NOT dying trying to defend their mistress (how very “dulce et decorum est…”). A much better outcome would be successfully defending their mistress, then dying peacefully years later with her at their side! Seriously, there were at least three instances of unnecessary cruelty to dogs in this book. One elderly terrier gets shaved and (at a different time) pinned to a tree with an arrow! Just WHY?
2. People can obviously respond to sexual assault in a variety of ways but going almost directly from “I’m so traumatized that I’m basically sex-repulsed” to “Actually no, I love you so I’m totally fine with sex now” is not generally how it goes! And this man’s approach: “I-I’m afraid I will hurt you. But-but I need you, Jenny, I ache for you, I don’t think I can -”. Don’t think you can WHAT motherfucker? Wait a little longer so as not to re-traumatize your teenage wife? OMFG. That’s why, in a story I’m writing where one of the main characters has had a series of bad experiences with men, it takes her over a year to stop jumping or flinching when her boyfriend/fiancée – someone she very much loves and is attracted to – touches her unexpectedly. And he doesn’t rush her, because he’s not a monster!
The fae, who were the ones to tell Sorcha how to break the curse, are of course also utterly useless during this assault. But they do tell her that she has to leave, taking only one bag, and give her a boat. She’s too weak and demoralized to row properly, of course, so she nearly drowns and is rescued by a Briton named Hugh (though everyone calls him Red). He takes her back home because he figures out that she knows something about his missing brother Simon from a carved token he left her. On the way, there are some nuns who try to persuade him to leave Sorcha with them. I have no idea why he doesn’t follow that advice! It doesn’t seem like a place that would be easy for her to flee, and he knows his people don’t like the Irish and already suspects his uncle had something to do with Simon’s loss (and is therefore a special threat to Sorcha). So…yeah, great job there fulfilling the protection instructions the fae gave you, Red!
This is where the love story is supposed to kick in. But, while I do like the growing understanding between Red and Sorcha, I was not feeling the romantic chemistry at all. That might be because giant burly dudes who can’t talk about their feelings are not my type at all…but evidently Sorcha wasn’t feeling it either! When he suggests that they get married so she’ll be more protected, her internal reaction is basically “I’d rather not, but that makes logical sense, I guess”…but then he gives her this ring that clearly took ages to carve, and she’s dumbfounded that he was apparently considering marrying her for the past year! She doesn’t realize her own feelings either until someone points out that she looks like she's pining. THEN Simon turns back up and is like “Why didn’t you wait for me?” Huh? First of all, I don’t know what narrative purpose this out-of-left-field guilt trip is meant to serve. Second, it makes no sense. Simon, she didn’t “wait for you” because she obviously wasn’t in love with you! She was a frickin’ twelve-year-old tending the wounds of a traumatized fourteen-year-old boy who occasionally freaked out and threatened her with a knife! To be fair, the fact that we spent seventy pages on young Sorcha helping Simon made me think he must turn out to be the “foreign king”. It would have been nice if he’d been the one to find her and help her in return but, because he’s the second son, not be able to entirely protect her from his hostile family. Alas, that was not what we got!
What about our main character? Well, it’s hard not to like or sympathize with Sorcha, but she’s not a super active main character. Pretty much every important thing she does is instigated by someone else. It is her brother Finbar’s idea to save Simon, though she is persistent in trying to care for him; the fae give her the task that will save her brothers, though it is her decision to keep doing it; Red makes her go to Britain and persuades her to marry him for protection; Her brothers want her to leave Red, so she does; Red shows back up to plead his love, so she lets him stay. It makes the brothers complaining about their lack of agency as swans ring really hollow! People keep talking about how “strong” she is, which mainly seems to mean “able to endure endless suffering.” But then, at the last minute, she changes her mind about what matters most, using her voice to warn Red of danger when she thinks the curse hasn’t been broken yet and that speaking will doom her brothers. But it actually has broken, so there are zero consequences for that action! Her hands also go back to normal for no apparent reason, so that wasn’t a permanent sacrifice either.
One other weird detail: The youngest brother, Finbar, who is left with one wing, had a swan wife and two cygnets! That’s why he was so slow to come. Did he HAVE to come, for the others to be freed? Unclear. Then he disappears again, and it would actually be kind of nice if he just turned back into a swan and went back to his family. But Sorcha explicitly tells us that she doesn’t think that’s what happened.
Overall recommendation: I don’t want to leave you with the impression that there was nothing to like about this book. As mentioned, the nature descriptions were lovely, and the bit leading up to whether Sorcha would be burnt at the stake or not was genuinely very tense and exciting. And I wouldn’t say anyone is wrong for liking this story. But there were just too many things that made me either bored or angry for it to be a really enjoyable reading experience for me.
