Juniper and Thorn by Ava Reid
(Del Rey, 2022)
Reviewed by Ksenia Shcherbino
Ava Reid’s Juniper and Thorn is a dark and complex story about identity, silencing and betrayal, and forgiveness. Its fairy-tale setting is as delightful as it is misleading—there is nothing magical about abuse and trauma, and the wondrous and baroque details hide all too common violence and power struggles within a dysfunctional family.
Marlinchen is the youngest daughter of Zmij Vasilchenko, the last wizard of Oblya, an ancient land swallowed by the cosmopolitan and capitalist empire of Rodinya. The eldest daughter, Undine, is beautiful and can see the future, the middle daughter, Rosenrot, is wise and skilled in herbs. As it often is the case with the third child, Marlinchen is plain-faced and simple-hearted, and her gift to read people’s feelings by touching their skin is closer to a curse. Her father seems to love her most, but his love is a curse, too, as there’s neither warmth nor kindness in it.
“Let her eat black plums and never taste the poison… Let all the bears she meets be friendly and pliant, and never men in disguise. Let her never fall prey to the banality of the world. Let her never fall in love,” runs the father’s prayer yet the eldest daughters regularly sneak out to attend ballet performances at night, and this time they take the youngest sister with them…
Marlinchen’s world is densely populated: there’s a monster under the bed, a fiery snake who speaks with a human voice, a homeless goblin shut up in a garden shed, a polyamorous bare-chested and goat-legged former god. But the worst monsters are hiding in human shape, and she will have to challenge them to gain control over her life, once she escapes into the world to find a strength of her own.
Reid’s masterful juxtaposition of stories, identities and mirrors is poignant and elegant, and there are far more layers to it than I am able to tell without spilling out the plot. She brings together magic and business, the charmed gloom of an enclosed garden and the limelight of the stage. Her brilliant and whimsical imagery reminded me of Marc Chagall’s paintings. The painter’s deep engagement with the tragedy of the Russian revolution, the war resulted in a personal visual vocabulary filled with images from his native rural Russian villages and Yiddish folk tales has a certain echo in Juniper and Thorn, steeped in Slavic imagery and ballet extravaganza.
The novel is reportedly inspired by “The Juniper Tree”, one of the darkest stories in brothers Grimm’s collection, yet it also reminded me of the pan-Slavic story of Maria Marevna who is abducted and locked up by the evil sorcerer Koschej (or Zmij, in other versions) and is to be saved by her husband Ivan, with the help of a magical bird and other magical creatures. In Juniper and Thorn it comes to Sevas, a brilliant young ballet dancer, to battle the evil. It is both romantic and ironic that the male lead is a performer re-enacting a fairy-tale on stage.
Fairy tales are, by nature, scripted, so Marlinchen’s question, “Could you ever escape the story of your own life,” reads almost as an anti-climax. Yet Reid reminds us that unabridged fairy tales are gruesome, wild, and cruel, and that happy endings come at a price, a price paid by blood and tears and loss. Juniper and Thorn is a beautifully crafted story about love and family, mythology and ballet, set against the grim landscape of capitalism encroaching onto the land of old magic. Its plot is tightly woven into a tapestry of Slavic mythology, almost Freudian exploration of Eros and Thanatos, romantic imagery of classical ballet and the darkest moments of unabridged fairy-tales. The novel seem dreamlike, but there’s little oneiric behind it. It brings up deeply troubling history of domestic violence, underage abuse and trauma survival, and for this intensity and beauty it is easy to forget an occasional slip in ballet terminology or minor plot gaps. Not for the faint-hearted.
Review from BSFA Review 22 - Download your copy here.