If she can complete 3 impossible tasks she will be given what she needs to save her sister from the evil Prince. That will be the easy part. A cast of unusual characters and a whole lot of chickens. A perfect escape.

Nettle & Bone, by T. Kingfisher, is a fantasy about the youngest of three Princess siblings, Marra, setting out on a quest to kill an evil prince who has mistreated her sisters and worse.
I truly adored this book! It was my first by this author, and what a voice they have-so nuanced, magical, and rich! I loved the world building, and can so clearly picture the land the story takes place in, with its different kingdoms described in beautiful detail.. I loved how dimensional and alive the characters felt(especially the heroine, Marra, who I found to be so relatable), and I liked that this was very clearly a fantasy meant for adults, despite it’s fairytale qualities. This is a book I will definitely be picking up to re-read again in the future, because it was just that good.
I would recommend this book to any mature fans of Fantasy, since there are distinctly adult moments and themes, and it is a dark book, overall.
I give this book a very strong 4/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.
Thanks very much to Tor Books and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader’s Copy. All opinions are my own.

Great book! Okay, the first quarter was a bit depressing in a ‘what happened to the Kingfisher humour’ sort of way. Starting with cannibals and a bonepit is not my happy place. However, once the other characters were introduced—with special mention to the demon chicken—the story became a romp. I devoured the book in a day.

Curious about the cannibal kingdom, though. Seems like an interesting alternate storyline that could be resolved in another book.

As always, everything T. Kingfisher writes is literal perfection. Nettle & Bone is probably my favorite thus far, full of dangerous, blighted lands, strange magic, and evil princes. I could not put this book down and read it in one sitting. Marra was an awesome main character, and I loved all of the others, even Kania. This was set in such an interesting world, and while I know it's a standalone, I'd love more books set in this world!

T. Kingfisher's newest fantasy romance has it all: a princess on a mission, a powerful witch, and a chicken with a demon inside of it. Join Marra as she embarks on a journey to save her sister from an evil prince with the help of the dust wife, her fairy godmother, a noble knight, and the aforementioned possessed chicken.

Perhaps I am not quite as avid of a reader of high fantasy as I previously thought, but I just could not finish this book. I found the world building to be a bit slow and the plot just was not compelling enough to keep me going. I know this seems to have been a popular book, so perhaps I am just not the target demographic. Her writing is lyrical and gorgeous, but I just could not get into the story enough to warrant finishing the book.

When someone tells us something is impossible, we usually take that pronouncement at face value. We know that we either don’t have the talent to do the thing or that the thing requires too many resources or changes or that the thing violates the laws of physics. When Marra hears that something is impossible, she does the thing. She does the thing because not doing the thing means that her sister will die at the hands of a wicked prince. In Nettle & Bone, by T. Kingfisher, we see Marra and her band of allies take on the impossible in this dark but very satisfying fantasy. This book will be perfect for readers who like fairy tales but who also wish that they could be a little more practical.

Marra is the youngest of three sisters in a very small kingdom caught between two more powerful ones. In order to eke out a little more independence, Marra’s mother arranges for Marra’s oldest sister to marry the prince of the northern kingdom. When this sister dies abruptly, Marra’s next oldest sister goes as a replacement. Marra is sent to a convent to be kept out of the way. She is not very diplomatic; she asks far too many questions for anyone’s comfort. But when she’s summoned north for her sister’s laying-in and subsequent christening of her niece, those uncomfortable questions reveal that the prince is dangerously violent. Marra has to do something to get her sister out of there while also avoiding an invasion of her home. It’s an impossible task, but we know from page one that Marra isn’t afraid of doing impossible things in the name of saving lives.

On page one of Nettle & Bone, we see Marra create a dog from bones and wire. Anyone else would say that this is impossible. To Marra, the bone dog is just the latest in a list of impossible tasks given to her by a dust-wife (a witch who can speak with the dead) in exchange for help getting rid of the prince. Before long, Marra assembles a group of unlikely heroes to go north and death with the magically protected prince: the bone dog and the dust wife, of course, but also a warrior who made the mistake of sleeping in a fairy ring and a godmother who is better at cursing things than delivering blessings.

Once I got the hang of the book’s tone (adventurous with lashings of metafictional snark), I enjoyed the hell out of Nettle & Bone. Marra delighted me as a heroine and I loved Kingfisher’s originality. I would definitely recommend this to readers looking for a fast, fun read that’s not too fluffy.

A darker kind of fairy tale! The story follows Marra, the youngest of three sisters who watches as her elder sisters suffer at the hands of the same prince until she discovers the severity of his misdeeds and decides to take matters into her own hands with the help of an old woman and a chicken. A tale of bravery and the lengths one would go to to save the ones you love. This book is amazing! T. Kingfisher does an outstanding job and I can’t recommend it enough!

What a fun and unique twist on a traditional fairytale. This is not the first book that I have read by this author and it's writing like this that keeps me coming back for more. There were times that I felt the story was slow, but realized it was building up into something stronger.

I was blown away by the innovative, original scope of the plot of Nettle & Bone. Each time the author flawlessly executed a new point of interest it not only furthered the plot but enriched it, with enchantingly grim characters and a wonderfully rich backdrop to a simple tale. I felt like I was watching a Guillermo Del Toro movie, such were the morbidly lovely characters which were conjured up at apt moments to deepen the stories of each protagonist; the Dust-Wife and Agnes were particular favourites of mine, two traditionally “bad” tropes which were turned on their head and exquisitely repackaged into a refreshing outlook on their core elements, a necromancer and a villainous fairy with so much personality they overwrote the usual cheesy angles other authors would have lazily opted for. Fenris is a charming addition to the party, never overbearing or the classical Strong Man, despite being one, with a tenderness that allows the reader to care for his well-being in time with Marra's developing feelings. Bonedog, of course, is the star of show and will forever have my heart in his illusory jaws.

There are many books currently saturating the market right now that gloss over a fae-centric theme, whereas I found Nettle & Bone offered up an effortlessly beautiful, wild tale that was as intriguing as it was gruesome at times, always pushing forward with Marra's goals without sacrificing any of its integrity by scooping up new themes along the way.

A richly coloured tale, Nettle & Bone is an imaginative maelstrom of love and magic, woven as beautifully as a Godmother's tapestry.

This book was so much fun - I think one of my favourite things is when authors twist fairytales. It's a very readable book, even when it gets dark and was pretty overall entertaining. I see a lot of comments about how it was missing *something* from other Kingfisher books, and I'll generally agree with that sentiment - it's a very easy book to get into, compared to some of the others. The characters are so relatably human, and the writing and worldbuilding is really excellent. Would recommend.

Thanks to the authors, publisher and NetGalley.com for allowing me to read this ARC

This was a very fun twist on the traditional fairytale. I love the authors writing style, I'll definitely check out her backlist titles. I really enjoyed seeing so many classic fairytale tropes in a different light, usually a dark and twisted or comical light. Even though this is a classic story about princes and princesses, it doesn't shy away from adult themes and horrific imagery. The only negative thing I can mention is that it became a bit boring for me in certain parts so it took me somewhat longer to finish than it usually would for a book of this lenght. But I still really enjoyed it and can highly recommend it.

As much as I adore this author’s romantic fantasies, and I absolutely do, sometimes I actually prefer her horror novels. If you haven’t read The Hollow Places and The Twisted Ones, you should definitely get on that.

This is very much a novel in two parts. The beginning introduces our main protagonist and tells the story of how she came to be on the perilous mission she is currently undertaking. And the second part is her gathering a small group of allies on her quest to kill a king and rescue her sister.

Marra is the princess in a faraway kingdom, whose only real resource is their proximity to a deep harbor between two much bigger kingdoms, who are also rivals. Her older sister is married off to the prince in one of those kingdoms and there is great pomp and circumstance when she leaves to start her new life. There is only sadness when her body comes back home shortly afterward, with the rumor of a mysterious fall. Then Marra’s other sister is married off to the same prince and leaves to do her duty. Shy, reserved Marra is shipped off to a convent and is more than happy to spend her days gardening, knitting, and staying out of the royal life.

Then she starts to slowly realize exactly what is going on behind the castle walls between her sister and the evil prince and she sets out to rescue her and stop the prince from killing another one of her sisters.

This book starts out with Marra in a bone patch, slowly knitting those bones together to form the shape of a dog. She has been given three impossible tasks by a powerful gravewitch, and she is bound and determined to get them done. When she breathes life into the bone-dog, she begins her journey back to the Dust-wife to find out how she can complete her deadly goal.

The scenes go back and forth of Marra on her current trek, to her life as a royal princess, then later as she settles into convent life and only makes appearances in times of importance. Her character growth from sheltered youngest sister to woman on a quest is slow, but I enjoyed this character quite a bit. She is willing to sacrifice herself in order to save a sister who wasn’t really all that nice to her because it is the right thing to do.

She is joined on her journey by several amusing characters. The dust-wife and her demonic-possessed chicken, a knight rescued from the goblin market, and a reluctant fairy godmother who isn’t really in control of all of her gifts. They make an amusing rescue party. This author sprinkles in just enough wit and snappy dialogue to break up the dark and sinister themes throughout the book. There is also a sweet, low-key romance that will have fans of this author’s fantasy romances happy.

The climax and conclusion were well done and I was satisfied at where it left all of our wonderful characters. T. Kingfisher should be an author on everyone’s fantasy must read lists. I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.

I love T. Kingfisher and was so glad to see this book getting a lot of recognition on Goodreads! This was funny, heavy, scary and wonderful all rolled in to one little package. I loved the characters and found myself chuckling multiple times as I read this. Marra's internal monologue was a treat. I love how even minor characters are unique and important, even if they are demonic chickens. This world seems so magical and interesting that I would love to know more about it. The author's books have a way of sticking in my head and I'm sure this one will too. This is one of the best books I've read so far this year.

HIGHLIGHTS
~curses can be more useful than blessings
~don’t doubt the moth
~almost-nuns get shit done

Nettle & Bone is as readable as all of Kingfisher’s books – I finished it in under 12 hours – but it felt like a bit of a let-down. Which I think is mostly due to the amount of hype it’s gotten and the expectations I had going into it, because it is not a bad book! Not at all.

It’s just that I was expecting to be blown away, and I wasn’t.

In a lot of ways, Nettle & Bone feels like someone turned the dial down on the Kingfisher persona to make her work more approachable for first-time readers; it’s a lot less weird, and much less funny, than anyone who’s been following the World of the White Rat books is going to expect. It also felt much…not darker, but grimmer, than anything I’ve seen from Kingfisher before – which is an odd thing to say, I know, because all of her books deal with real-and-rough topics. But the vibe was different here. Maybe because it’s built around marital physical abuse, and never takes it anything but seriously (as is only appropriate)? Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another Kingfisher book that dealt with as dark a realistic issue – most of the time, the Serious Issues are…either not quite as serious, or a little bit removed from what the average reader can expect to ever experience. Clockwork monsters and death mazes are awful, but most of us will never run into either, will we?

As usual, Kingfisher’s characters are wonderfully human, immensely relatable in a way fantasy characters often aren’t. Marra is a princess, but only on paper; she’s been raised in a convent and eventually makes a space for herself as the healer’s assistant. She’s no good with fancy things or crowds or people in general, really – and she has absolutely no idea what to do when she discovers, almost by accident, that her sister’s husband is abusing her. That helplessness is painfully relatable, and I thought it was handled (and portrayed) very well. But she does eventually latch onto the idea of seeking help from a dust-wife (a kind of graveyard-keeper crossed with a witch), and from there the adventure unspools.

There were glimpses, here and there, of Kingfisher’s signature whimsy and weirdness…but surprisingly little of either. Both the dog of bones Marra creates as one of her Impossible Tasks and the demonically-possessed chicken played extremely small roles; the delightfully strange but somewhat unnerving Toothdancer we only meet for a moment. The visit to the Goblin Market was probably my favorite part of the book, with all the non-humans and their magics on display, Kingfisher’s imagination clearly given free rein. Other than that, there was one brief aside about how Marra’s kingdom believe that the souls of the damned are devoured by crabs, and that was…kind of it? There wasn’t a whole lot of wonderful weirdness/weird wonder here, which was really disappointing.

I do think the synopsis is hugely misleading; the Impossible Tasks take Marra a few pages to complete – they’re certainly not the focus of the story. (Unless you count killing a prince as an Impossible Task, which, fair.) Also, although I’ve referred to it as an adventure, describing Marra’s travels that way is stretching it a bit. She goes to find the dust-wife, they go to the Goblin Market, they pick up a couple of friends along the way, and head to the prince’s city. (One reason this book is so short is that Kingfisher, sensibly, fast-forwards through the actual travel parts. Despite that, she still manages to have all the relationships develop believably.) And finally – I wouldn’t really call this a book about sisterhood. Marra and her sister don’t really have a relationship, and the general impression is very much that Marra would go to these lengths for anyone – the fact that the woman who needs help is her sister isn’t really relevant. That made me like Marra more, but it does mean that Nettle & Bone isn’t really about the powers of sisterhood.

It’s not at all a bad book; it was extremely readable, even the grimmer bits. But it’s nowhere near the level of any of Kingfisher’s other books, in terms of addictiveness or humour or strange-but-delightful-ness. I don’t know how readers who are new to Kingfisher will feel about it, but for me, after Swordheart and Stranger in Orcus and The Raver and the Reindeer? After all those, Nettle & Bone is a let-down. It’s definitely not the book I’d give to someone who’s never read Kingfisher before.

4.5 stars.

Oh, how I loved this book! It's out of my comfort zone, I'm not usually a fantasy reader, preferring dark and creepy thrillers and ghost stories to other worlds and fairy folk. But I was reading The Twisted Ones by T.Kingfisher, and loving it (and laughing out loud) when I saw this pop up on Netgalley (thank you kindly).

It tells the story of a princess who has to undertake three impossible tasks to win the help of a "dust-wife" (a witch who can speak with the dead) in order to kill a prince. Along the way she meets a cast of loveable, flawed characters as they embark on their quest.

It's a fairytale at heart, but also a tale of found family, sisterhood and determination. Highly recommend.

A tremendously entertaining modern fairytale (it's got three tasks, fairy godmothers, etc.) with genuine emotional maturity, a propulsive plot, and flawed characters (who the reader will surely still love.) Another great one from T. Kingfisher's fantasy side.

Was recommended this author by a fellow bookseller and was worried it would be a bit to dark for me but I really enjoyed it and I am so glad I was able to read it. Something about the style and main character was so engaging that I had to keep reading and I absolutely loved the little snippets of dark humour throughout.

In Nettle and Bone we follow Marra, the third born princess of a small kingdom, who was raised in a covenant ready to be used as a pawn (like her older sisters) by a neighbouring kingdom and its prince. It turns your typical princess fairy godmother fairytale upside down.

I loved Marra, she pushed through her fears and committed to saving her family after realising that no-one would help them but her. The first 20% had a time jump that made it a little difficult for me to initially connect with her and other characters but I quickly became familiar with her.

It explores motherhood, forced pregnancy, domestic abuse and miscarriages, both for an individual and those who care for them, with such tenderness and care that I truly appreciated. Other aspects of the novel including the world building and the magic system fell a little flat for me but didn't really detract from my overall enjoyment.

Throughout the book we meet more characters until we reach a motley band including; a nun(ish) princess, an undead dog, a chicken possessed by a demon, a witch who can communicate with the dead, a fairy godmother and a rather handsome brooding mercenary. I really enjoyed the moody tone with spots of humour and I will definitely read more from Kingfisher.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor for the advanced readers copy.

If you're a fan of T. Kingfisher, I can say "this is exquisitely T. Kingfisher" and know that you'll run for a copy of this book. (Fair warning: book does include reference to family violence, and an abusive partner.)

If you're not already... maybe you're a fan of Angela Slatter? Kingfisher's books remind me of her work too.

What does that mean?

They're both doing fascinating things with fairy tales... except not really fairy tales, because they're not always familiar stories, but it's the vibe of fairy tales - fairy tale logic - fairy tale expectations and narrative structures. And I don't mean Disney versions, I mean grim/m and sometimes gritty and meaty and fully embedded in the world, where not everything is lovely and wonderful but sometimes they are, and sometimes by force of personality you can make a change in the world and sometimes you just have to roll with the world's punches.

I loved this book a lot.

There's a princess who doesn't especially want to be and who is really sure that she's good at it, and a bone dog, and two godmothers, and a dust-wife. Also a quest and a heavy dose of gritted-teeth determination and a good level of snark, generally dished out by old ladies, which is of course the best sort. It goes at a good pace - not so fast as to leave you spinning, but you're also not just sitting around always admiring flowers. I read this quickly and it felt just right.

This book keeps Kingfisher as one of those novelists whose work I just read pretty much automatically. I mean, it includes such gems as: "My dog trusts me... My dog is witless and also dead" and also this, addressed to a chicken: "I know you aren't broody, demon, but you're going to make an exception or so help me...".

Definitely should go on your to-read shelf.