After slipping away with her sisters to see the ballet, she stumbles across a young man whose deepest desires mirror her own, setting in motion a painful journey toward emancipation.

Here, a cruel wizard endlessly hungers under a curse, and his three daughters try their best to survive him. We see her completely unable to comprehend that someone might find her attractive, let alone someone she think is as ludicrously beautiful as Sevas, the book's ballet star love interest.

We watch as Marlinchen begins to develop her taste for rebellion and escape, and exactly what she has to grapple with at home to reach for what she wants in life. These nighttime escapades offer salvation, but when Marlinchen captures the attention of a ballet dancer just as lost and isolated, her visits to the outside world become less uncommon.

As the youngest of the family, she is treated as precious and innocent, yet chastened for her ignorance. She was a child raised on magic and a fairytale codex and since this was a fairytale retelling, it seemed fitting. I also knew the author wanted to explore trauma and abuse, specially in family relationships, so I was pretty sure I'd love this story.This is a dark and bloody tale, full of magic both otherworldly and familiar, and despite its monsters, it reads like comfort. The author explained on her instagram account that those scenes were descriptions of intrusive thoughts, something that people in real life who deal with PSTD might have. Every sentence in this novel is striking, with imagery and prose that threatened to devour me whole. I think these three books did a good job of showing how a family member’s abuse can destroy the relationships between siblings and turn them against each other as they hurt each other to protect themselves.

Reid went overdrive with the body horror, adding an excess of gore and bodily functions to the excess sex, so it turns unpleasant very quickly, it grosses you out reading all the vomiting, all the guts out, the blood.It occurs to me that Reid could have taken a much darker turn here—in addition to all the other horrible things that happen in this book, Marlinchen’s lover could easily betray her. I like Eastern European fairy tales a lot, so whenever a book is announced with a blurb stating it takes its inspiration from Eastern European tales, I pay attention. And it doesn't stop there, everything from sexual assault to paedophilia to incest is thrown at us without warning from there on, and whilst I'm not a stickler for trigger warnings, the excessive amount of triggering this book can set off merits saying that there should've been better warning for readers.