Nettle and Bone, by T. Kingfisher

Having enjoyed Kingfisher’s novel A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking (and the podcast conversation I had with my friend Christine about it), I picked up her latest, Nettle and Bone, when I saw it at a good sale price, and I’m so glad I did. I liked it even more than Wizard’s Guide.

As with Wizard’s Guide, the heroine of Nettle and Bone is a reluctant and unlikely heroine, pulled against her will into saving — well, not the world, or even a whole kingdom, but saving her sister from a horrible marriage to an evil prince. Marra is the youngest and least impressive of three princesses; she’s sent to a convent as a young woman, and is relatively content there until she decides she’s the one who has to step up and do what nobody else has, even if it’s to benefit a sister who never seemed to like her all that much.

I liked Marra as a main character, and I particularly liked the unlikely cast of characters she assembles around her as she travels — a grumpy witch, a hesitant fairy godmother, an enslaved warrior, a possessed chicken, and a dog assembled from the bones of dead dogs. They’re a wonderful band of unlikely misfits, and I found myself caring a lot about whether they all made it to the end of the story alive. I won’t tell you whether they all do, because if you like quirky, quiet, funny fantasy novels at all, you should just read this yourself.