God I just loved this. It’s steeped in far magic, secrets, deception, friendship, identity and kindness. Nettle herself is an incredible main character, and I love all the characters she meets along the way. A lot of this made my heart sing with joy. Bex writes stories that grip you from the get-go and have you hooked throughout. I’d LOVE more from Nettle.

NETTLE is a gorgeous faery tale, drawing from a wide range of stories.

The book has all the seductive charm and dangerous of faeries. They are capricious and beautiful and cruel here, treating humans as playthings and hating the sight of them. The faeries are both more than and less than human all at once.

The atmosphere of the book mirrors this, bringing the world of faery to life and threaded danger through all the beautiful parts. It has the lilt of a tale told generation to generation, spoken around fires and over flickering candles.

NETTLE a very addictive tale, hard to put down (and it's quite a short tale so you can put aside the time to devour it in one should you want.) It's gripping not in the way of a high action thrillers, breathless and heart racing terror, but in the way of mist drawing you deeper into the woods than you thought you were. You want Nettle to outsmart these tricky tests and get free. You want her to get justice for other trapped humans.

The tasks at the heart of the book echo the task in The Wild Swans, though with a new twist as to the importance of the nettles. Luckily, Nettle is also allowed to talk so she can make friends more easily. The feud between the king and queen of faery feels very reminiscent of that in Shakespeare's Midsummer's Night Dream. There are also hints of other faery stories in the Grizler and Beattie and many more characters and tales told within the pages, letting the book sit neatly alongside this old tradition of telling tales about the beautiful and dangerous lurking just beyond touch.