Nothing is more intriguing and entertaining than stories of the infamous witch of witches, Baba Yaga. She shows up where you least expect, in her legged house - and you get some info on that house too. Written almost in prose, a somewhat magical read.

"They call her a witch. They call her a goddess. They call her a cannibal. But mirrors tell the wrong stories. And so do people."

The first time I fully heard about Baba Yaga and the stories people told, I was in college, in a creative writing class and listening to one of my peer's stories that she wrote on her. I was utterly shocked but enraptured by the story and began to look into Baba Yaga more.

To see this collection full of different stories relating to Baba Yaga is amazing. I didn't realise how much I would enjoy most of these stories in their different varieties. The storytelling was chilling in some and spine-tingling in others.

This collection delighted me to no end. It being a collection of women-in-horror authors is what initially interested me (and the mention of the Foreword by Christina Henry who I adore as an author too) and then to hear it was all about stories of Baba Yaga, I was immediately sold!

A few of the stories I really enjoyed were;

Last Tour into the hungering Moonlight by Gwendolyn Kiste,
Of Moonlight and Moss by Sara Tantlinger,
The Space Between the Trees by Jo Kaplan

and honestly so many more. Each tale had its own unique voice and qualities that made them a joy to read.

A huge thank you to the publishers for providing me with an eArc in exchange for my honest review!

*thank you to Netgalley and Black Spot Books for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review*


2.5 stars.

I found this to be just ok. There were some stories that I thought were quite good but the majority were either more of a neutral feeling towards them or I simply didn't like them.

I noticed that most of the stories I did enjoy, were towards the first half of the book and the few at the end, I really struggled to get through because I didn't find them interesting at all. My mind kept drifting off.

One thing I did like is that there was a big variety of storylines. While they all centred around Baba Yaga, there was a lot of diversity in how the story about her was told. Some where mainly focused on the more traditional stories we have heard and some were really quite different. This I hadn't expected and was pleasantly surprised about.

Another positive to note is that I really like this cover. That's what caught my eye and then when I found out it was about Baba Yaga, that's when I knew I wanted to read this.

However, that doesnt change the fact that I personally didn't love most of them. I know that we are all different though and I can see this book currently has a lot of positive reviews so I think I'm just the odd one out here.

If you have an interest in Baba Yaga stories then I do suggest you give this book a go. You may really enjoy it, or maybe not. But it's worth seeing for yourself.

This was a fun one. Anytime I see anything about Baba Yaga I immediately want to read it. Why? Because she is fascinating in every light. Would I want to come across her chicken legged home in the woods? Absolutely not! This anthropology captures Baba Yaga energy completely and provides a taste of all sides of her. In some stories she is a baby eating villain, and in others she is the heroine.
While I enjoyed this anthropology as a whole, I did have favorites: The Story of House by Yi Izzy Yu, Of Moonlight and Moss by Sara Tantlinger, Mama Yaga by Christina Sng, Herald the Knight by Mercedes Yardley, and Water Like Broken Glass by Carina Bissett.

I really like anthologies because they give you a taste of something different and short. I also really love stories about Baba Yaga.

The stories in here had some themes of mother/daughter relationships and female power. And of course the witch in the woods with many different faces, Baba Yaga. It was a fun horror read without being too scary.

Firstly, thank you, NetGalley and Xpresso Book Tours, for the chance to read and review 'Into the Forest: Tales of the Baba Yaga.'

I'm a big fan of short stories. An excellent short story slaps in a way a novel can't! And these focus on the Baba Yaga! Of course, I had to request a copy!

Into the Forest is a collection of 22 short stories (and a poem) by female writers focusing on the Baba Yaga. It was published by Black Spot Books on the 8th of November, 2022, and is 272 pages long. The collection aims to focus on the various interpretations of the Baba Yaga and her place in the modern world.

As a whole, the collection was a mixed bag. Some stories were undoubtedly better than others. Lindy Ryan needed to do a better job of taking some of these stories out. By the end, I was bored with the collection; I just felt like I had read too much to DNF it.

Also, sometimes, things should only be open to a limited amount of interpretation. For instance, Herald the Knight is a cute story, but it does not work within a book about Baba Yaga. There are also some incredibly basic stories (I don't want to name them) that could be about any woman turning into a witch instead of the Baba Yaga, like incredibly generic. So when you have these stories that don't really match each other in terms of energy and creativity, the collection as a whole goes down, which is sad because some of these authors were really good.

That being said, I loved that most of these writers didn't shy away from the more horrifying aspects of Baba Yaga instead of sanitising her; she is the Baba Yaga, after all. The book also introduced me to some writers who I have high expectations of!

I love anything Baba Yaga. I appreciate that she embodies all aspects of womanhood - the kind, the wicked, the powerful, and the grotesque. This anthology reflects these aspects back at the reader and challenges them to examine how Baba Yaga lives inside of each of us.

This is an excellent collection of Baba Yaga retellings. The stories were all varied but kept the heart of Baga Yaga. They range from the fantastical, to fairy tale, to very dark and creepy, to fiercely feminist.. I enjoyed the vast majority of these stories. They are written so well and offered such doffernt perspectives on the lore of Baba Yaga. I would highly recommend this collection to anyone who’s interested in Baba Yaga and would like to explore different possibility to her as a character. Amazing anthology!

Into the Forest is a collection of stories inspired by Baba Yaga, the witch of stories that lives in a cottage that sits on large chicken legs and is decorated in human skulls. In those stories, she flies through the skies in a mortar and pestle, and can strike deals with mortals if her whims take her in that direction rather than murder and mayhem.

We open with a poem, a spell. Then we are slowly drawn in from our time to that of the past over the next stories. Baba Yaga might be in the brambles outside an oppressive HOA, or she could be on the other side of a bog waiting for those desperate enough to find her despite the stories about her. She could be old or young, but knows magic and doesn't conform to the patriarchal society we know. In "Wormwood," she isn't even physically present to enact judgment but watches everything from the surface of collected water. In other stories, she directly saves the young ladies that would have been killed, taking them on as apprentices.

Other fairy tales are referred to, which I found especially fun. "Mama Yaga" turns Hansel and Gretel on its head, and "All Bitterness Burned Away" twists some of the story even more. "Water Like Broken Glass" draws on the myth of the Rusalka. Though there's no distinct myth in "Fair Trade," it also carries the weight of fairy tales and how getting wishes granted doesn't mean you're truly happy. The forest and nature are indifferent to wants and needs, and many stories reflect that here. In some cases, that chilling indifference lingers long after the book is shut. That's definitely the sign of a well-cultivated collection.

I love the idea of this anthology that collects works from 26 different women worldwide, all on the theme of the mythical Baba Yaga. It's a really rich subject open to different, intriguing interpretations. For those of you unfamiliar with the myth, our subject is the old wise woman of Slavic lore, who lives in a house that walks on chicken legs, dispensing terror or justice as the mood strikes. Christina Henry's excellent foreword points out that Baba Yaga wasn't necessarily ever just one figure either, but was sometimes three, often sisters, but always otherworldly and beholden only to her or their own rules.

Fitting, then, that she's the subject of this fiercely feminist grouping of tales. Her ambiguous reputation provides fertile ground for the speculative fiction author. Is she a benefactress or beastly or both? Is she something to be run towards in hope or run away from in horror? I found that my favorite stories of this bunch definitely leaned more towards the former than the latter, but that's the beauty of this collection, its absolute openness to any variation on the theme.

That is also, perhaps, its greatest weakness. In its eagerness to accept any spin on the tale, the anthology occasionally loses coherence, as the tone whipsaws wildly between moods instead of building gradually to an overarching whole. The ending, for example, felt better left to the quietly poetic Baba Yaga In Repose by Heather Miller. Instead Saba Syed Razvi's equally poetic but much more metaphorical, almost anthropological, Shadow And Branch, Ghost Fruit Among The Lullabies provides an unnecessary coda that pulls focus from the lady in question to talk about the women she haunts instead. I can understand the argument that those inspired by her are more important in the long run than the witch herself, but I didn't really come here to read about them, did I? Centering her influence instead of her actions makes this collection feel more like sociology than fiction, more like textbook than entertainment.

So it's no surprise that I far preferred the stories where Baba Yaga herself was the protagonist, as in my favorite, Herald The Knight by Mercedes M Yardley. Perhaps I'm a sucker for a fairy tale, but this story of Baba Yaga in love just made me happy. I also enjoyed Baba Yaga as avenger in Linz McLeod's Wormwood, and Baba Yaga as atoning mother in Christina Sng's Mama Yaga. All Bitterness Burned Away by Jill Baguchinsky is another brilliant subversion of Hansel and Gretel, as Baba Yaga learns with the reader not to make (often anti-feminist) assumptions. Interestingly, these last three all share in common the question of who gets to tell stories in the first place, whose histories are made acceptable to be passed down through the ages, a metaphysical exploration I quite enjoy, especially when told subtly and not with a sledgehammer (see textbook complaint above.)

The stories of Baba Yaga in the modern day, especially as the devil in the woods desperate women run to, were a harder sell for me. Fair Trade by Jacqueline West was probably the best of those for me, followed closely by Monique Snyman's Birds Of A Feather. I was actually super grossed out by the protagonist of another story in this vein, an overwhelmed wife and mother of two whose life was one big pity party. I could generously assume that the author meant for us to believe that only the lazy and wicked turn to murder and witchcraft to solve their problems, but the amount of sympathy displayed to the main character -- whose life was seriously <i>not that hard</i> before she just snapped -- was tough to ignore.

Overall, this was a hit or miss collection for me. The good stuff was really rad, but the rest of it was kind of a chore to get through. I'm glad the book exists -- the premise is great! -- but I think it could have been focused a little more tightly. It tries really hard to be all things to all readers interested in the Baba Yaga myth but ends up feeling uneven depending on where your own reading tastes lean.

Into The Forest: Tales Of The Baba Yaga edited by Lindy Ryan was published November 8 2022 by Black Spot Books and is available from all good booksellers, including <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/15382/9781645481232">Bookshop!</a>

Thank you NetGalley and all of the authors that filled this book with creatively imagined stories of the Baba Yaga.

This book is complilled of stories and poems of the Baba Yaga and how she came to be. From her childhood, to becoming a woman, to first finding love. The mix of each story giving it's own take on the Baba Yaga makes this so much more enjoyable. All Fables start with a grain of truth to them, which i think is mentioned much more poetically in the book somewhere, but the amount of different stories not only shows the creative imaginations but the different versions of Baba Yaga that have been told to a multitude of people. I will have to say that my favorite story in this book is the one told from the Chicken's point of view and how he became her house. I never expected that and was blown away by that story alone. Second favorite would be the one where she falls in love with a knight after swearing off love forever.

The only thing I didn't enjoy about this was that you couldn't read this book straight through from one story to another. It was much harder that way. This is a book that is good to read only one chapter a night for and coincidentally, one story at a time. I do think that if the stories were placed in maybe a chronological order from Baba Yaga's childhood to the tales of her when she was older it would help with a sort of timeline that would be better to follow when reading each chapter continuously.

This was a great compliance of Baba Yaga stories that anyone who enjoys mythology would love. They may not be true to the original myth, but who doesn't enjoy a little spin off that makes you think..

"For so long, we were told we needed to be perfect. But all we ever really needed was to be wild."
-Last tour into the Hungering Moonlight, Gwendolyn Kiste

Deep in the dark forest, in a cottage that spins on birds’ legs behind a fence topped with human skulls, lives the baba yaga. A guardian of the water of life, she lives with her sisters and takes to the skies in a giant mortar and pestle, creating tempests as she goes. Those who come across the baba yaga may find help, or hinderance, or horror. She is wild, she is woman, she is witch—and these are her tales.

I love reading witchy folk horror books, and this book gives me all the witchy and folk horror vibes I need at this time of year. This is a collection of short stories written by amazing female authors, infusing each story with feminine magic and horror. If you like beautifully written folk horror stories about strong female characters, touching on topics like love and romance, revenge, family, murder and magic, then this is the book for you. I will definitely buy a physical copy of this book.


"Not every woman becomes a witch. Some of us are born into it. Others struggle for a while. A few of us- the drowned girls, the birch brides, the unquiet spirits-do both."
-Water Like Broken Glass by Carina Bissett


My favorite stories in this book are Last Tour into the Hungering Moonlight by Gwendolyn Kiste. I think this is one of the best stories in the whole book. In this story Baba Yaga is a form of refuge for women escaping from the patriarchal society and the horrors of men.

Moonlight and Moss by Sara Tantlinger. In this, we meet an outcast princess set on an impossible quest in the woods, until she meets the Baba Yaga. Will she choose to save herself, or her cruel unloving father and her sister?

Water like broken glass, by Carina Bissett. The writing in this story is just so beautiful. In this story, two women are intertwined by love, murder and magic.

Mama Yaga by Christina Sng. This is a re-imagining of the classic tale of Hansel and Gretel, told from the perspective of the witch.

Herald the Knight by Mercedes M. Yardley. I loved loved loved this story! It was a nice twist to the Baba Yaga, because this story tells the tale of when she fell in love.
"I think I love you. The words had mass, and she took her time to taste them, to test them, They didn't hold the onerous weight she had expected. They din't wrap around her ankles, wrists, and throat. She wasn't shackled to anything. Instead, they felt more like pearls she could choose to loop around her neck, or bubbles that rose joyously through the water."

All bitterness burned away by Jill Baguchinsky. This writing is like a dream, so ethereal and I just love it.

Baba Yaga learns to shave, gets her period, then grows into her own by Jess Hagemann. My second favorite story in the whole book. This is the Baba Yaga origin story I always wanted.

Stork Bites by Eve Knight. I think this story scarred me for life.

Thank you to the publisher, the authors and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read this book! This review will be posted on GoodReads, Amazon, Storygraph and instagram.com/jodinelinnea

What a feat!!! I enjoyed EVERY SINGLE STORY in this book. There wasn't a single one that was lacking
I loved the different angles, time lines and constructs. I can't get over how good this was. I'll definitely be buying a physical copy for my library.

Do yourself a favor and read it, buy it, borrow it from your library. Just get your hands on this collection of short stories.

Thank you Netgalley for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions expressed are my own.

“If Baba taught her anything, it was that when push came to shove, she was a woman made of teeth.“*—excerpt from “A Trail of Feathers, a Trail of Blood” by Stephanie M. Wytovich

This anthology is infused with feminine power. Here the crone rules, as does the mother and the maiden. In some stories Baba Yaga is a baby-eating villain, and in others, she is the heroine, and in one, she is the object of desire.

I enjoyed each author’s take on the theme. While I enjoyed every story, my favorites are as follows:

“Last Tour Into the Hungering Moonlight” by Gwendolyn Kiste: In this beautifully rendered first person plural tale, Baba Yaga becomes a refuge against patriarchal horrors.

“The Story of a House” by Yi Izzy Yu: Tragedy brings about transformation and power in this fairytale rendering of the construction of Baba Yara’s unusual house.

“Of Moonlight and Moss” by Sara Tantlinger: A princess must choose to either save herself or her cruel father and her golden child sister.

“Wormwood” by Lindz McLeod: Wormwood, the true scent of grief, becomes a tool to deliver a dose of justice.

“Mama Yaga” by Christina Sng: A delicious take on the story of Hansel and Gretel.

“Water Like Broken Glass” by Carina Bissett: Love, murder, and magic bind two women.

“Herald the Knight” by Mercedes M. Yardley: A Baba Yaga love story that is unexpected and wonderfully weird.

“A Trail of Feathers, a Trail of Blood” by Stephanie M. Wytovich: An apprentice of Baba Yaga is forced to make a sacrifice in exchange for a second chance.

“Baba Yaga Learns to Shave, Gets Her Period, Then Grows Into Her Own” by Jess Hagemann: Unshared life lessons that become Baba Yara’s alternate origin story.

“Fair Trade” by Jacqueline West: In order to escape death, a girl seeks Baba Yaga’s help, but the solution becomes its own curse.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Thanks to Black Spot Books for providing an Advance Reader Copy via NetGalley.

*Please note that my review is based on uncorrected text.

Thank you so much to Black Spot Books and Netgalley for the eARC of this horrifically inviting anthology series starring the Baba Yaga. I am currently playing Wild Beyond the Witchlight, a Wizards of the Coast Dungeons and Dragons adventure, and it features Baba Yaga and her daughters quite heavily. As such, I was already excited to dive into all of these stories, but I had no idea the creativity and magic I'd find between the pages. Each story was a completely unique look into the witch, the grandmother, the crone that is Baba Yaga.

Every girl is born with teeth and with claws. Society demands that we trim the latter and hide the former, and as such, we are stripped of our ferocity. Baba Yaga is a cautionary tale because she was able to escape; keeping her feral nature and becoming a figurehead of horrific deeds-- likely due to those who cannot handle unbridled female spirit. However, there are many sides to the Baba Yaga-- and those are all displayed beautifully in this collection of stories. We do see the child-eating, soul-stealing, and ruthless woman whose ugly exterior matches her blackened insides. We also see the matronly savior of wayward girls, the voice of the forest, and the reluctant harbinger of doom.

Every side of a lady, stunning or frightening, can be found while reading Into the Forest. It is not just a deep dive into the fairy tale of Baba Yaga, but into womanhood. We are all Baba Yaga in our own ways-- just waiting to run into the forest and never come back. I loved these tales, told by women and for all those that care to heed the cautionary tales of not respecting the fairer sex. Each story was lovingly chosen and readers will be able to see the heart that went into crafting each one. I very much recommend this book, both as a woman myself and as a horror aficionado. You will fall in love with Baba Yaga's sharp grin and clawed embrace.

I would like to thank #Netgalley for the opportunity to read #IntotheWoods.
I adore books about Baba Yaga, I don't feel like there are enough books out there about this beguiling woman and her home on chicken legs. You never know what you are going to get with Baba a kind old lady or one of your most horrifying nightmares. Shee is the woman most women turn to in their hardest times knowing that she can be the answer to their problems. However Baba Yaga always gets what she wants and she is a crude and cunning woman.
Please go out and get this book!!! All the different stories about Baba Yaga in Into the Woods are wonderful and somewhat mindboggling.

Into The Forest wove every kind of tale (love, mystery, horror, drama) into the legend of Baba Yaga.

Baba Yaga is folklore, the old crone witch sometimes or a beautiful young enchantress others. She’s either the giver of wishes and dreams or the destruction and death of those who enter the forest.

I loved all the stories and it was extremely hard to pick favorites. Sara Tantlinger’s tale, Of Moonlight and Moss, tells of an outcasted princess sent on an impossible quest into the dark wood; the re-imagining of Hansel and Gretel, Mama Yaga, by Christine Sng; the motherhood story of sacrifice, Stork Bites, by EV Knight; an old crone hands out wish boxes to children that are not what they seem in The Peddler’s Promise by Catherine McCarthy.

For lovers of folklore, folk horror and fairytales.

A great selection of original short stories by some very talented women authors. A fantastic creepy read for darker evenings.

The editor has 23 dark feminist stories this collection about Baba Yaga. She has many faces—Baba Yaga can be kind or cruel according to folklore. She is known to bee a witch. The stories in this collection are horror, persistence and more. Some of the stories are set in present time and others are set in historical times. There are also some stories set in fantasy times.. the writing is excellent. The authors of these stories show you the different sides of Baba Yaga’s personality. It’s an excellent way to meet Baba Yaga.

I enjoyed this collection of short stories. They varied from poetic to cerebral to harsh. The different styles and angles the authors came from was refreshing. Nobody was rehashing the same content and it felt like the collection was curated well.