Tag Archives: fairy tale

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Book Review: Weep, Woman, Weep – by Maria DeBlassie

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I agreed to review Maria DeBlassie‘s Weep, Woman, Weep as part of its Goddess Fish Promotions Book Tour. The book has also previously been featured over on Sadie’s Spotlight. So, you can nip on over there for author information and an excerpt.

BookCover_WeepWomanWeep

The women of Sueño, New Mexico don’t know how to live a life without sorrows. That’s La Llorona’s doing. She roams the waterways looking for the next generation of girls to baptize, filling them with more tears than any woman should have to hold. And there’s not much they can do about the Weeping Woman except to avoid walking along the riverbank at night and to try to keep their sadness in check. That’s what attracts her to them: the pain and heartache that gets passed down from one generation of women to the next.

Mercy knows this, probably better than anyone. She lost her best friend to La Llorona and almost found a watery grave herself. But she survived. Only she didn’t come back quite right and she knows La Llorona won’t be satisfied until she drags the one soul that got away back to the bottom of the river.

In a battle for her life, Mercy fights to break the chains of generational trauma and reclaim her soul free from ancestral hauntings by turning to the only things that she knows can save her: plant medicine, pulp books, and the promise of a love so strong not even La Llorona can stop it from happening. What unfolds is a stunning tale of one woman’s journey into magic, healing, and rebirth.

my review
I admit that I am not really a raver. I tend to be fairly reserved in my praise. Regardless, I have to say that Weep, Woman, Weep is a truly exceptional story of surviving and escaping generational trauma (sometimes over generations, by virtue of dilution as much as individual grit). Through Mercy the reader is able to see the struggles and challenges of the endeavor—as well as the failures— and feel the exuberance of growth, revelation, freedom, and rejuvenation.

The writing is haunting and lyrical (quite gothic) and DeBlassie manages to relay the despair and dangers to Mercy’s (and the other young women of her town) without forcing the reader to sit through anything graphic for the shock factor. (It wasn’t needed.) The characters are likeable and distinct. The editing is clean and the cover is gorgeous. Whether you call it gothic horror, fairy-tales, or magical realism, I’ll be well up for more of DeBlassie’s writing.

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Other Reviews:

Coffee and Wander Books – Review: Weep, Woman, Weep

Review: Weep, Woman, Weep by Maria DeBlassie (2021)

Weep, Woman, Weep

the faceless woman

Book Review of The Faceless Woman (The Otherworld #4), by Emma Hamm

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I received an Audible code for a copy of Emma Hamm‘s The Faceless Woman, narrated by Siobhan Waring.

Description from Goodreads:

Once upon a time…

A town will only suffer the presence of a witch for as long as she is useful. Aisling watches the flames lick her thighs and prays for a quick death. But when an Unseelie prince appears through the smoke, she does what any self respecting witch would do.

She curses him.

Bran should never have traveled to the human realm, and is shocked when a witch binds them together. His life is hers and he refuses to die. He saves her from the fires, casts a hex on the townsfolk for good measure, then whisks her away to safety. His only stipulation? She has to remove the binding curse.

Unfortunately for them both, she can’t. Witch and Unseelie must travel across the Otherworld to break the ties that bind them. Secrets and lies stand between them, but both will stop at nothing to save themselves.

Review:

I was honestly surprised by how much I enjoyed this. I love that almost every time I thought it was going to fall into some PNR trope it subverted it. Here’s an example (I’m paraphrasing), during the only (mild) sex scene Bran trotted out the common “say ‘no’ now, I won’t stop after this.” I hate when heroes do this and you hear it all the time in PNR, like the hero he isn’t saying “I’ll just go ahead and rape you if you try and stop me past this point” and the reader is supposed to feel it’s something else, romantic even. I groaned when he said it and then cheered when her response was, “I don’t want you to stop, but if you think I couldn’t stop you if I wanted to, you don’t know me well.”

That’s Aisling in a nutshell, never afraid to call someone out, never making herself smaller, never dulling her shine for someone else, but also never falling into harridan or shrew. I so much appreciated that both she and Bran were as honest with each other as they could be, never faulted the other for what was out of their control, and Hamm never took the easy ‘misunderstanding’ or ‘angry over secrets’ plotting path.

I look forward to reading more of this series, maybe going back and starting at the beginning. And if I can get the audio, even better, because Siobhan Waring did a marvelous job.

Book Review of The Bitches of Everafter, by Barbra Annino

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I’m still on my road trip and let me tell you it’s great for getting my reading done. As a bonus, I seem to have internet again, so I can still post. Just to repeat myself though, there is no guarantee I will tomorrow or the next day. So, if I stop posting it means I’ve been physically serrated from the digital teat and I’ll show back up when I reach civilization and wi-fi again. Now, on to the review.

The Bitches of EverafterI downloaded a copy of The Bitches of Everafter (by Barbra Annino) from Amazon when it was free.

Description from Goodreads:
These are not the mild-mannered maidens of your childhood. These are fallen princesses and fierce women with no recollection of who they are, where they came from, or how they arrived in a mysterious town called Everafter. All they know is that they’ve been sentenced to a stretch in a half-way house by a malicious judge with an ax to grind. They’ve been stripped of their freedom, their kingdoms, and their true loves. Now, they have nothing left to lose. 

Snow White is the newest parolee to arrive at Granny’s House for Girls. It isn’t long before she learns that her housemates harbor secrets, and that the mansion itself is a meandering enigma. She stumbles upon forbidden doorways, ghostly passages, and walls that seem to breathe. Determined to find out what’s really happening inside those old walls, Snow embarks on a dangerous discovery mission. Not everyone is thrilled about her nosing around. In fact, there are some who would kill to keep the secrets that the house—and its occupants—hold. 

Review:
This was a cute idea and the author managed to pull it off, but the shtick really did get old quickly. After a while it just started to feel ridiculous. It did make me laugh more than once though and the writing is pretty good. But if I was using ratings, I would take off half a start for not being a complete arc.

For real, some people might call this a cliff-hanger, but I don’t think that’s accurate. I don’t even think precipitous cliff-hanger is accurate, because nothing wraps up in this story. It literally just ends. I firmly believe that in order to be a cliff-hanger the book needs to leave something open for continuation while some part of the story concludes, thus marking the end of the book. That doesn’t happen here. This feels MUCH more like a serial than a series and I HATE serials. Why would I want only part of a story? I won’t bother with the next installment. Because this is a trilogy, so the next one will probably be just as incomplete. (See, author-person, you’ve completely created distrust in your reader.)