Greenteeth, Molly O'Neill

Book Title: Greenteeth

Author: Molly O'Neill

Date Started: March 16th  2025

Date Completed: March 25th 2025

Genres: Historical, Adventure, Fantasy

Quality Rating: Four Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Four Star

Final Rating: Four Stars

Review:

◆ Thank you NetGalley for this eBook copy for review ◆ 

Greenteeth is a love letter to the folklore, mythology and fairy tales of the British Isles. Taking inspiration from a breadth of sources, a Jenny (river-hag), a witch and a goblin are sent to all corners of the UK on a classic adventure quest done right.

This book was so much fun, with so much heart. Someone please make it into a Dreamworks animated series or film. It marries together wondrous discovery and friendship with real struggles of identify, belonging and activism. I loved that the characters were all fallible, and their conflict often comes from understanding each other as much as the antagonists.

I'm so happy there's a resurgence of retellings of UK myth alongside the Classical and Asian reimagining that have recently come to prominence. And Greenteeth really does tick the box of every beloved cornerstone of our storytelling canon; from Fae to Avalon to unicorns to witches to the Wild Hunt to goblins and more. And it recognises the darker origins of these storytelling traditions; the novel is mostly 'cozy' but respects the primal aspects of old lore. Even as someone who wrote their dissertation on fairy tales (in film specifically), there were new things for me to uncover and devour.

While the hype around this book seems moderate, as a debut novel it really does leave a lasting impression - and for someone who love folklore and myth as much as I do it's a dream. I hope O'Neill does more work in this sort of storytelling.

He Who Drowned the World, Shelley Parker-Chan

Book Title: He Who Drowned the World

Author: Shelley Parker-Chan

Series: The Radiant Emperor #2

Date Started: March 2nd  2025

Date Completed: March 16th 2025

Genres: Historical, Adventure, Fantasy

Quality Rating: Three Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Three Star

Final Rating: Three Stars

Review:

◆ Thank you NetGalley for this eBook copy for review ◆

Full disclosure, I didn't love She Who Became the Sun but was fascinated by the way it was telling its story and its LGBTQ+ representation - but despite that still being great in this novel I, somewhat unsurprisingly, didn't love this sequel either.

These books are full of military escapades, deadly politics and domestic strife, and I have no doubt their interpretation of history (that I'm not familiar with) is creative. But I've just found both books too dense for me to really enjoy them. I've struggled keeping track of nicknames and titles on top of the characters' actual names, and the relation of locations to each other on the map - admittedly, made more difficult by reading on kindle rather than a paperback you can flip back to the start for reference.

But I think the fantasy elements are quite a good example of why there's just a bit too much going on for me; they're so light-touch that it almost feels like magical realism and only show themselves in relation to ghosts. I love this idea - and the way it's used in the finale even more so - but you go a hundred pages between instances of it appearing at all in the world. We flip between intense periods of military strategy and war, to extended bouts of martial conflict and back again. I can see where creative license has filled in gaps in a pre-realised timeline, but I found it hard to really immerse myself in.

Credit where it's due, the fluidity and organic openness to gender and sexuality in this duology is groundbreaking and liberating, and I strongly hope Parker-Chan goes on to write more of it - but maybe a little lighter on the strict militaristic records. I'd love to be able to spend time with the characters, but these books so faithfully follow a historical timeline that I find it difficult to spend time with them over their conquests.

The Dark Mirror, Samantha Shannon

Book Title: The Dark Mirror

Author: Samantha Shannon

Series: The Bone Season #5

Date Started: February 26th  2025

Date Completed: March 2nd 2025

Genres: Fantasy, Romance, Adventure, Action, Dystopian

Quality Rating: Four Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Five Stars

Final Rating: Four Stars

Review:

It's been a long time coming, but it's finally here. I was so ready to dive back into Paige's adventures that it took mere pages for me to be addicted again. I devoured chapters at a time and read the whole thing in 4 days despite its length. My inner mythology and archaeology nerd was spurred on even faster, and I lapped up the references and inspiration from Rome, Venice and beyond.

I appreciated the reminders of previous events threaded into the text. I would often criticise info-dumping, but it's constructive here; it's been a staggering five years since I read The Mask Falling. And for those who haven't reread the stories in the 'author's preferred texts,' don't worry. Shannon does direct readers to her website for a very short list of amendments, but it's been so long that I honestly wouldn't have batted an eye at the changes regardless.

There is a lot of talking in this book which, while enjoyable, made it feel less high stakes than what I remember of the previous books. An awful lot happens, but an awful lot of it happens off the page and outside of our protagonist's presence. That's just how it works when you have a first-person narrator, and I continue to be impressed at how the complex political and magical worlds are mostly kept accessible to the reader via the prose and Paige's inner circle's view.

I couldn't write this review without acknowledging something that I think went over my head when I was younger and reading the first books: Shannon's sense of place. She recreates real cities I've never been to as if they're outside my window and paints the places I know well with so much vibrancy it's like discovering them again for the first time. Her storytelling hinges so much on this staggering sense of reality and an instinctive desire to explore it - which Shannon allows us to in Paige's wanderings, her curiosity to seek out hidden sides of the city, and her evergrowing talent of inadvertently destroying any building she walks past. The heavy use of dialogue mentioned above almost doesn't matter; you can taste the air Paige is walking in, and that's powerful.

I'm hoping that the last two books in the series come out in closer succession to this one, as The Bone Seasion series thrives on momentum. The escalating conflict is reaching a crescendo in real time with these characters, and to throw us in in something close to real time too will make the fever pitch of whatever finale we're approaching unforgettable.