Daughter of the Forest

Book: Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier


Sorcha is the seventh child of an Irish lord, after her six brothers. When her father remarries, her new stepmother, the Lady Oonagh turns out to be a beautiful and malicious sorceress. After several engineered mishaps befall Sorcha and her brothers, they convene and attempt to do something about the enchantment holding their father in thrall. Instead, they are interrupted by Lady Oonagh, who casts a spell to turn them into swans. Sorcha however manages to run away and thus escapes the curse. Wrought with despair over her brothers' fates, she accepts the only solution given by the Fair Folk of the forest: to weave six shirts of starwort (a plant with barbed and poisonous stems) for her brothers, while keeping absolute silence. But love comes and complicates her mission.

This is a retelling of the fairy tale 'The Six Swans', and it stays pretty faithful to the Grimms' telling. It's a historical fantasy set in 9th century Ireland and incorporates the Celtic myths of its day. There are some mentions of early medieval Christianity, but the pagan lores are what drives the story, what with all the capricious Fair Folk running around messing with ordinary people's lives. I'd heard many good things about this book and I love fairy tales, so I really wanted to like it, but...it was a bit of a letdown, thanks to several things that lowered my overall enjoyment of it.

First off, there is a somewhat graphic rape scene in this book. Sorcha goes to hell and back in her quest to save her brothers. Now, I'm not against bad things happening to characters in general, but there's no denying that rape is a sensitive issue. I hadn't noticed any mention of it in the reviews I skimmed, so it came as quite a shock to me when it happened, and that probably cost me. It was all the more viscerally upsetting because I'd gotten quite emotionally invested in the character by then, and I had to put away the book for a day or so before I could pick it up again.

I don't think that the disclosure of this will in any way 'spoil' the book for anyone, so I believe it might be better if readers are given a trigger warning beforehand. Some may believe the 'shock value' of it might induce more empathy on the part of the reader, but sorry, I just can't see rape being used cavalierly as a 'plot twist'. There is no doubt that I would've enjoyed this book better if I'd been warned and knew to gird my loins (horrible pun not intended). So. If you're reading this, you have been warned.

Secondly, I found the change in tone, or rather, the shift in focus, hard to follow. The brief summary I gave above is actually quite misleading about its pacing. The events that set the tale in motion don't happen until about 100 pages into the book. It didn't start out as a romance (the love interest only turns up around the halfway mark), but it ended as a romance. Ironically, the half without the romance was my favourite, despite me picking up this book for its promised romantic elements.

I have always said that I'm not much of a prose person, and that I'm a very reactionary reader -- what I left out is that I find it much easier to articulate what went wrong than what I liked. For the latter, I'm not sure what to say beyond readthisreadthisreadthis! So this next part is kind of hard for me to write. I have to say, as little as the attention I pay to prose, that I like Marillier's. Daughter of the Forest is written in omniscient first person, almost like a memoir, and it worked for me. I cared about the world she introduced to me, I cared about what happened, and I cared, period.

It's precisely because I liked it so much in the first half that I cared much more about the characters introduced to me then, and the romance took second place. All I felt was a strong sense of urgency for Sorcha to complete her task so she and her brothers would be saved, and everything else, especially the romance, just got in the way. Well okay, that's not fair -- it didn't get in the way, I just wasn't very invested in it. I was much more invested in the completion of her task, and thus I didn't empathize with the love/family dilemma. The hero's confession at the end was romantic, or at least I know I would've thought so in another book, but I'd stopped seeing this book as a romance by page 202, and really didn't care so much about that aspect.

My apathy towards the lovers' fate carried over to the ending, and all the loose ends made it extremely dissatisfying. In fact, the only thing that's resolved is the love story, which is why I said the book ended like a romance -- since it was as if the only thing that should matter at that point was that the hero and heroine lived happily ever after. Unfortunately, as I've explained, that obviously wouldn't be enough for me. I felt like I was left hanging. I know that this is part of a series, but I just don't feel like I got any emotional payoff after sticking with Sorcha's story for so long (it felt really long, okay) and I'm a bit leery about trying the sequels because of that. Plus, they deal with a different set of protagonists.

Some minor caveats: I had a bit of a problem with the heroine being in a completely helpless and vulnerable situation for majority of the book, but since that's how the original fairy tale goes anyway, I was willing to overlook it. The heroine starts out 13 in this book and finishes it aged 16. Some people might be creeped out by that, but I considered it largely in keeping with the mores of her time, and also she sounded way older than a 13 year-old.

There is a twist on the old romance rule of the first strange man the heroine encounters being the love interest, and I found that bit intriguing. Kudos to Marillier for that.

Final thoughts: I'm a bit traditional in what I expect in my reading, which is probably why I like genre fiction so much. So despite the many things I enjoyed in this book, the experience is dampened by the things I didn't. 3/5 on goodreads for me.

I have plenty of other authors I want to try before I'll think about getting back on board with this one. (but I'll be checking reviews for any possibility of sexual violence when I dip my toe in again.)