Tatiana's Reviews > Daughter of the Forest

This book remains one of the best fairy tale retelling I've ever read. Marillier grounds this familiar story in a tremendously rich historical and cultural context. However, this book is dense, and it is long and gut-wrenching. For me, it needs some lightness to be a 5-star read.

Also, I remembered very little about Daughter of the Forest before this reread. But one thing I did remember - it was Kat's review of it, in which she talked about the need for authors to not only depict traumas and their aftermath in a real way in their books, but the healing process too. Kat is right. Sorcha goes through a lot in this novel to save her brothers, but her "healing by love" was quick and not entirely realistic.
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4.7 stars

Aside from a couple of minor qualms, Daughter of the Forest is pretty much an example of an almost perfect debut novel.

This book is a beautiful retelling of the Celtic "Swans" myth, which has been familiar to me since childhood through the Hans Christian Andersen's version - The Wild Swans. Sorcha is the seventh child and the only daughter of Lord Colum of Sevenwaters. When Colum remarries after being widowed for almost 13 years, the evil stepmother (and witch) puts a dreadful spell on Sorcha's six older brothers. The only way to lift the spell is for Sorcha to undertake a difficult task accompanied by a lot of pain, loss, and terror...

The best part about this book is that Juliet Marillier stays pretty close to the source material, not transforming the original into an unrecognizable horror fest as some modern writers often do. Instead, she enhances the myth with a beautiful love story, realistic historical background, admirable characters, skillful infusion of ancient magic, stories of dedicated friendships and unyielding sibling devotion, and a couple of utterly despicable villains.

There are not many flaws to this wonderfully written book. The story is intense, heartbreaking, and passionate. My main complaint is its length. While the book is only 400 pages, at times it felt it was twice that size. No matter how much I read, I couldn't get through more than 50 pages per day. I don't know if the font was small or the narration was a little heavy, but it took me forever to finish this book.

I loved the story and there are some intriguing loose ends left unresolved and therefore I am pretty certain I will read the second book in the series - Son of the Shadows, but I definitely need some time to regroup, because it's even longer than Daughter of the Forest.