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"The Yaga siblings--Bellatine, a young woodworker, and Isaac, a wayfaring street performer and con artist--have been estranged since childhood, separated both by resentment and by wide miles of American highway. But when they learn that they are to receive a mysterious inheritance, the siblings are reunited--only to discover that their bequest isn't land or money, but something far stranger: a sentient house on chicken legs. Thistlefoot, as the house is called, has arrived from the Yagas' ancestral home in Russia--but not alone. A sinister figure known only as the Longshadow Man has tracked it to American shores, bearing with him violent secrets from the past: fiery memories that have hidden in Isaac and Bellatine's blood for generations. As the Yaga siblings embark with Thistlefoot on a final cross-country tour of their family's traveling theater show, the Longshadow Man follows in relentless pursuit, seeding destruction in his wake. Ultimately, time, magic, and legacy must collide--erupting in a powerful conflagration to determine who gets to remember the past and craft a new future"--… (more)
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Advanced Readers Copy provided by edelweiss.
This book is about the chicken-footed house of the infamous Baba Yaga, brought into modern America, but even more its about humanity, psychology, evil, and survival. Though the books slips from perspective to perspective like someone
Foremost, the praise: the prose is gorgeous. There were multiple lines that made me say, "Wow" out loud. The book could be read and enjoyed for its language alone. However, this is not a gentle read. Major trigger warnings apply here, as there is a deep exploration of despair, death, and pogroms. It covers brutal subject matter in a heart-wrenching way.
Other aspects bothered me, though. Isaac is the kind of callous rogue who repulses me on a deep level. I struggled to get into the book because of his chapters through much of the book. The story is also surprisingly linear. It delivered little in the way of surprises through the end. Some major questions around the whole initial set-up of Thistlefoot (the house) and the bad guy coming to America were never answered for me, either.
The estranged Yaga twins, Isaac and Bellatrine, are brought back together when they are bequeathed a family heirloom from a long
I’m not familiar with the legend of Baba Yaga beyond the most basic understanding, but I feel that Nethercott has done her research and reworked the legend nicely as a story of Jewish survival. While sometimes loaded down with an excess of purple prose, the story is still wildly engaging. Nethercott has that rare ability to write a story with characters who seem to exist somewhere out of time; while the story seems to be taking place in the now, the characters have this timeless quality about them and could be existing in the then and now simultaneously, especially Isaac. He could be living as a vaudeville performer in the 1920s just as easily as a puppeteer performer in the 2020s.
I wasn’t as sure that I was going to like this at first (unfortunately, the purple prose really can drag the story down at times), but ultimately this turned out to be a great read for me. A huge thank you to @netgalley and @vintageanchorbooks for an eARC in exchange for an honest review. THISTLEFOOT will be available September 13, 2022.
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The book does stay with you long after you have finished it. I received a complimentary eBook from Netgalley.com in exchange for a review.
I'm giving two stars here because the author seems to be a good
Thoughts: This is an intriguing book that focuses on a lot of different things at once. I enjoyed the beautiful, unique way it was written but at times got a bit frustrated with how much the story
The story follows the Yaga siblings. Bellatine is a woodworker who has graduated college and is starting to make a stable life for herself. Isaac is her brother and is a drifter. Isaac drifts from place to place taking what he wants from the world. They get notice that they have received an inheritance in the form of a chicken-legged house. In the end they make a deal to tour with it for a year, after that Bellatine will settle down with it. Their plans are sent askew when they find out the Longshadow Man is trying to hunt both them and the house down.
This was an intriguing story and very well done. I loved all the creativity and description here and the book is very beautifully written. The book jumps between many different points of view and times. Mostly we hear from Bellatine or Isaac. With Bellatine we mostly stay in the current day. Isaac alternates between telling stories of his travels and his modern day activities. We also hear from the house which tells different known stories of its origins but also starts to tell us its true history.
This is a world similar to our own but things like houses with feet aren't unheard-of; inanimate objects in this world also occasionally develop human parts. Also, both Bellatine and Isaac have power of a sort. Bellatine can awaken inanimate objects and Isaac can mimic other living people. There's enough magic here that this goes beyond magic realism into all out fantasy.
While I enjoyed this a ton I did struggle a bit with how many changes in both time and POV the story had. I was also a bit let down by how things ended. The reveal of the true history of the house and the end of the story sucked a lot of the magic out of it for me and made me feel really sad and let down. This book is less about the mythology of Baba Yaga and more about the importance of keeping memories and stories alive.
My Summary (4.5/5): Overall I really enjoyed this. I loved the creativity here and enjoyed the beautiful writing style. It was intriguing to puzzle out the story between all the different characters and time frames. However, this also broke up the story and made it a bit hard to follow. I do think this is an exceptional story and it was much different than other books I have read. I enjoyed delving into an alternate history of Baba Yaga and her tale. I would recommend this and plan on keeping tabs on Nethercott to see what she writes in the future.
So there’s plenty of willing suspension of disbelieve needed to enjoy this tale. That would be fine with me, if it weren’t for the fact that I found the writing, on a sentence and paragraph level, sadly lacking. This is a first novel for Nethercott, and she doesn’t seem to be in control of her prose at all. Most damaging, for me, at any rate, is the fact that the pages are full of cliches and lazy language. People glower. Their eyes become daggers. Pain scurries up people’s spines. Opening the book to a random page, one can find this: “Tom’s knuckles paled as they tightened on the wheel. His foot sank into the gas pedal, grave as a pocket filled with stones. . . .”
At one point we read, “The street was Dickensian, as if recreated from some Victorian era slum.” Well, but either you think I know what “Dickensian” means or you don’t. If you think I do, you don’t need the second part of the sentence. If you think I don’t, leave out the reference. And so forth. It’s unfortunate, because the storytelling and the imaginative thinking behind it are pretty good, especially in the book’s second half. The horrors of the pogroms and of lives cut short. The value of bearing witness and the illusory qualities of time and place. These and other elements make for a nice, thought-provoking narrative, as the story of the house and its pursuer are unfolded. Or they would have for me, if only I didn’t feel like I was getting poked in the eye with cliches and empty metaphors every paragraph. Well, I know that readers respond to these sorts of issues differently, and some folks just don’t care about them. Those lucky readers will enjoy this book much more than I did. Still, 3 ½ stars from me for the storytelling moxie.
This story was amazingly bizarre. Or bizarrely amazing. I'm not sure which.
This story is about time, trauma, massacres, living, dying, and never being forgotten.
We followed multiple protagonists from different time periods who are all commected by blood and trauma; both literally and figuratively. It's told in "present day" and a centry prior, not to mention the side stories that all added up to an incredible ending, that was very bittersweet
Perhaps it's just the mood I'm in, but this book really got to me. It hit me hard. It was dark and traumatic and sad. Some of the stories just broke me. All of the characters are beautifully flawed. The stories were so darkly whimsical. This was just beautiful to me.
All in all, this is an entertaining book, and reasonably creative, if somewhat predictable.
It is a Baba Yaga origin story that follows two of her descendants, Isaac and Bellatine. We get flashback chapters from the perspective of Baba Yaga's house, which were my favorite parts! This is a modern
It covers some heavy topics-the pogroms in the Russian Empire are a major plot point. It also deals with self-hate and accepting yourself.
This book gave me strong The Diviners vibes and I would recommend it to anyone who has read and loved that series.
Ok... well, please hold off on the lynching until I finish explaining. On the one hand the premise had tons of potential... potential for days and days, in fact it was so promising that I kept coming back to it again and again hoping it just needed
Now, on the other hand, I'm not saying that the writing was terrible... it was... nice. It was decent EXCEPT it was also blatantly, unapologetically, savagely, overtly descriptive AND then there was Isaac... Isaac was tough to like and not in that misunderstood, morally gray, relateable underdog/antihero kind of way. He just rubbed me the wrong way and I wanted to skip over his parts... skimming urges are a surefire sign of a laggy, boring, faltering read. Dreading spending time doing my favorite activity is no bueno so it left me with little choice. You'd think that a book about Baba Yaga's decendants would be chock full of Baba Yaga or at least a comprehensive magic system that's explained. Whelp, nope, not here. With how descriptive everything else was, you'd think that EVERYTHING would be explained, and maybe it was explained in the last 32% of the book, but I think I gave it the good old college try.
This was a chaotic read. There were multiple POVs, and they jumped around without warning or preamble. I relied on picking up clues/names in order to discern who's voice I was listening to. AND for a book populated with characters possessing magic, they sure were flat. Now, I think that Bellatine did save the tale (as much as it could be rescued from itself). If the book had cut out the insane amount of descriptives and been only about Bellatine and this chicken leg facilitated mobile home, I think I would have been able to finish. I did like how the book highlighted the plight of the Jews and some of the antisemitic discrimination that they unbelievably/tragically still experience even until this very day.
On to the World... the world building (minus the descriptive overload) was decent. It's just hard to get fully immersed in a book that devotes chapters to mundane things... how much time do you expect us to devote to hearing about (chapter's worth of) Bellatine's hands... no action, no anything... just descriptions about hands albeit magical hands but hands nonetheless.
Overall:
I know I'm in the minority here, but decent writing, okay world building, and a noncapitalized upon (yet interesting) premise weren't enough to snatch and hold onto my attention thus the DNF and the low rating. I feel slightly guilty not finishing this book especially since I was so graciously given a copy of it to read for free but I even bought the audiobook so I can say, with a (mostly) clear conscience that I tried... I really did.
~ Sorry
*** I received an advance review copy for free from NetGalley, and I am leaving this review voluntarily. ***