Juniper & Thorn

by Ava Reid

acrylic paint and cold sweat and nylon,

Acrylic paint and nylon are polymer based synthetics that weren’t commonplace until after the 1940s. I thought this was an industrial revolution eastern europe setting.

With a heedless rush of wanting, I tucked the feather into the pocket of my dress.

Literally moments after thinking of how her sister said she shouldn't come home with anything in her pockets. 😆

But your father isn’t here. So let me show you.”

“So-and-so isn’t here,” lol. The line of Bad Influence™️ Boys everywhere.

“It’s not really my city. The Vashchenko family has lived here since before it was Oblya, when there was just the steppe that ran right into the sea without anything to stop it. Before the land was lashed to bits and each scar was given a name like Kanatchikov Street. Oblya is a rude intruder to the place we’ve always known.” “And I am an intruder upon the intrusion?” Sevas arched a brow. “You don’t need to drag around your family history like an old dead dog.”

Damn. 😆 True, though. Very true,

What did I know of any history besides my own, and even that hazy, half-remembered? There was a whole world spreading its roots outside my father’s house, and oaks just as old as the ones in our garden. I grew up with his words and the stories in the codex, but did I really know anything at all?

(“I cannot stand to see another proselytizing fanatic knocking at the door,” he had said, and then cast a spell so that our house would look empty and uninhabited to any missionary who passed us by on the street).

Living the dream. ✨

“You got rid of it, didn’t you?” Her eyes were as thin as knife slits. I nodded. “Of course.” She released me again, her breath going out with relief. My lie felt heavy, like a bone in broth, leaching its essence into all my thoughts. But all I had to think of was Sevas’s shining blue eyes and the feel of his arm circling my waist to remember why I had told the lie at all, and why I would do anything to keep it buried.

Betraying your (actually nice, too!) sister over a boy you met five minutes ago 😆

I stood there in the foyer, trying to see all the places where Papa had laid holes in the floor or set out wires to trip on, trying to breathe shallowly so as not to tighten the noose around my throat. I held myself still and kept my lips taut, Rose and even Undine just as motionless, all of us doing our own silent arithmetic. Had we sold enough to make Papa happy? Had we spoken too freely with the visitors and made him angry? I was sure there was a protractor, or some devious spell, that could measure the particular curve of a smile. There was certainly a concrete answer that could absolve us as merely polite, or damn us as brazenly promiscuous.

I stood there for as long as I dared—Papa’s anger was an ugly wound that bled with very little prodding—considering my options.

It had two hearts, winging behind its sternum like a pinned butterfly. I cut the sinew from the cathedral of its rib cage and carved out its stomach.

“Cathedral” of its ribs? Her writing would be so much better without these overwrought, clunky descriptions. They stretch language to the point of distracting from the unfolding plot points.

The whole time I thought of nothing but Mama’s clamshell compact buried under the juniper tree. I wanted to curl up around it like a cat around its litter. I wanted to tuck it back into the cleft of my breasts and let it grow warm again with the heat of my body. If I could have forced it down my throat, I would have. There was nowhere safer for it than inside my stomach like a swallowed peach pit. It occurred to me very abruptly that I was hungry.

This lady is unhinged. Love it.

The stories tended to give you three chances for these sorts of things. Three nights of revelry before your carriage turned into a gourd. Three questions to ask the wolf before he showed his teeth. Three bites of an apple before you ate the poison in it. I could mete out my three chances carefully, savoring them like caramels; I could suck on them and spit them out again into my hand. Even the imagining of it felt thrilling and tasted sweet.

The vision seeped into me like someone had cracked a soft-boiled egg and let the yolk run past my eyes.

What ?? 😅 She is the queen of stretching figurative language into distracting nonsensical lines. How is something that seeps into you the same as something that runs over you?

I had made countless trades like this myself, vows that I would keep like holding a steaming skillet in my bare hands, biting my lip as it burned, debts that would come due only when everyone else had gone and the house was empty and I was lying curled in my bed.

Is this implying what I think it is? 😥

She lilted to the ground, limp and bodiless as a white linen dress.

“Lilted”? Author meant “wilted”, I think.

It’s no fun stamping through old dirty snow. People want to ruin things that are clean and new. And you should hear the way men talk! Some of our clients, even. A woman’s worthless and spoiled once she’s been bred. That’s why Papa can’t stand the idea. He can’t stand the idea of anyone spoiling us but him.”

There was something sick in me, something wrong. Even baby birds knew how to shriek, even kittens knew how to mewl, even puppies knew how to whine. Papa had told me I hadn’t even cried when he’d pulled me from between my mother’s thighs. I hadn’t protested when he dragged me through the streets of Oblya, hadn’t protested when Rose had chided me or when Undine had slapped me. My eldest sister was right; I would smile blithely if someone tried to saw off my leg. But no one had ever told me that I was allowed to scream.

I didn’t know what to do with the time that suddenly bloated up in front of me: hours swelling like dough left to rise, empty of all my usual tasks.

If Papa came home and saw me weeping he would punish me. Undine would slap me again and Rose would roll her eyes.

I like POV things like this where characterizations conflicts with assertions made by the protagonist. Like, I don't get the idea any of them would do these things, but Marlinchen is so stripped down mentally that it makes complete sense to her that they would. To me, it seems like her father would use her vulnerability to try to emotionally manipulate her rather than outright punishing. Undine would be the one to roll her eyes. As for Rose, I think she would start to feel bad and, while still annoyed, would grudgingly offer half-hearted words of support.

I would rather go hungry than try to keep all the roiling food down.

So this book really needs a content warning for disordered eating.

Every time I came in I imagined how my mother’s body had looked in the bed, back when she was still a woman and not a bird, all mortal and soft. Her breasts were lumpy from nursing us, nipples masticated by our baby teeth. Papa said it was only the curse that had made him stop loving her, but hearing Undine’s words echo I wondered if he thought that she’d been spoiled, too, by the mean banality of motherhood. No longer any good to him as a woman or a wife, better as a bird in its cage.

Either way, there was little you could do but resign yourself to your station in life, or else try to surmount the hopeless augury of your own mind.

I don't know if "augury" makes sense here.

The very last time, he wanted to test what was inside my skin. I was seventeen and unmistakably a woman now,

Wtf. I thought the sexual exploitation was taking place present day, but it was when she was a teenager ?! Kill these men with 🔥 This book should have like a whole list of content warnings ⚠️

In truth I never figured out why Dr. Bakay stopped coming to our house. Perhaps he had exhausted all of his medical curiosity, or perhaps my transforming body had exhausted him.

🫥

Of all the doors in our house, mine alone had no lock.

🫤

I had not let myself imagine what I knew to be the truth of it: that the house itself was riddled with thousands of small wounds, and every day they were wrenched further open, hours pulling at the ruptured skin.

I had thought that Papa had done his worst already. But his anger was insatiable and depthless too. There was always more of me that he could nibble at and gnaw, until he was sucking the marrow right from my bones.

But Rose and Undine would never have found themselves in such a predicament. They would have no wisdom to speak to me. And how could they? They had never been made to bleed from their breasts.

You don’t know that! 😐

Sevas said nothing. His gaze dropped to the floor while Derkach and Mr. Kovalchyk squabbled like two speculators over the same spit of land, caring nothing for it except that they might be able to till it and till it until the soil had exhausted itself.

Derkach released Sevas and turned toward the door. Mr. Kovalchyk’s eyes darted between them, and then over to me, looking as if he’d just been blown back by an exceptionally strong wind. His jaw unlatched like a wooden doll’s.

Mte, Kovalchyk.

“Do you mean to torment me?” he asked. I was as light as dust motes drifting through a tract of sunlight, as light as air. I took Sevas’s hand in mine and guided it to the small of my back, where the laces of my corset began. “Take it off,” I said, and then remembering my long-gone governess’s etiquette lessons, added, “Please.”

I wanted to give him the gift of hours, to gather them up in my apron like fresh apples and empty them into his lap. I wanted to feed him hours that were free of Derkach’s black, curdling rot.

“Papa’s waiting. And he’s hungry. It’s all he’s been able to speak of since you left. How his stomach is eating itself in your absence.”

Does nobody else in this family know how to cook!?

“You were as cruel to me as Undine,” I said. “You let me eat up all of Papa’s anger so it wouldn’t poison you. You didn’t mind that he ruined me as long as you were unspoiled and safe. If you ever loved me, it was only because I was a soft thing you threw down into the bottom of a pit to break your fall.”

Yeah, wow. This was a twist I didn't see coming.

His teeth came together with a sound like coins rattling in a can.

Couldn't get to the end without another weird, clunky and nonsensical simile. 😆

I followed him into the train station, which arced over us like the rib cage and vertebrae of some extraordinarily large creature soldered from iron.