"Thistlefoot" Discuss Everything *Spoilers*

[SFFBC, Ancillary Mod]

Come share all your thoughts with us about our fantasy pick!

A few questions to get us started:

1. What did you think of the characters?
2. What did you think of the fairytale elements and the world?
3. What did you think of the Thistlefoot interludes?
4. What worked or didn't for you?
5. Overall thoughts?

Non-spoiler thread here: First impressions

[Melanie, the neutral party]

I am not quite don reading yet, but I am thoroughly in love with the book. The characters are believable and fully developed (though this does make the book long). I most like the interludes. They break up the story in a way that improves the pacing and end up being integral to the plot eventually. I am not very knowledgeable about Russia fairy tales or the OG Baba Yaga. I guess I just know her as a trickster (kind of like Loki, but female). So the tales are interesting and entertaining.

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

Hooray!

[Ryan, Your favourite moderators favourite moderator]

So I finished this today...

The ending worked for me. I liked the talk about needing more than stories of a people's demise to keep the culture alive. I was nodding my head to that.
And I also liked hearing about Baba Yaga. There have been quite a few mentions of her in fantasy novels that I've read in the last 5 years, but never in a satisfactory way. I finally feel like I know something of the legend now though how accurate a depiction of her this was is beyond my ability to gauge.

But with that said, there were many aspects that didn't work for me. I didn't 'get' the sibling relationship. It felt wrong to me. I generally dislike controlling characters like the brother in this. And characters with his kind of verbally abusive tendencies of making people feel less than. But i suppose that's a me thing rather than a flaw in the story.
I didn't feel like the many threads of the story came together (soon enough) to make it an enjoyable reading experience. I wanted more from the house. And by that i don't mean i wanted more scenes with the house, but that the scenes we did get didn't scratch the whimsical magical itch that such fantastical scenarios need to keep me engaged. What I got was underwhelming.

I reduced the story to being about two people with special abilities trying to live fairly ordinary lives whilst a big bad undying evil pursued one of them. That's basically how i think of another book on the shelf, only that book had superb world building. :/

This was fine, but I can't see myself ever reading it again unless i need to remind myself of things to argue with Allison over.

[Melanie, the neutral party]

The sibling relationship tracks. You really can love and hate, admire and despise someone like that and irrationally want them to stay. It's a thing. Not a healthy thing, but a thing.

I LOVED the moment when all the house's stories started pegging into the character's real world. I guess I kind of hoped they connect more than thematically somehow, so I was delightfully vindicated @ that point.

I feel the same way you do about Baba Yaga and have maybe less valid background knowledge. I always imagine that Baba Yaga (regardless of what story she is in) looks like the house owner in Spirited Away.

The only parts that didn't work for me was how long it took for the backstory narration to reveal what was traumatizing each sibling, especially the boy. It got repetitive without adding to what was going on.

I am assuming (dangerous I know) that the part that wowed Allison is when the text nailed home how stories and remembering are how you rescue/repurpose/prevent a trauma. I will add that the narrator nailed the emotional pitch of these moments. I got feels in a good way.

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

Yeah, that's for sure a big part of it.

I liked that we didn't have a neat ending. People are still damaged, still weird, but I liked that it felt sort of like Thistlefoot saying yeah, this is just another part of my story, and someone will tell how I was born from a shipping crate.

I liked the resonance of it, that the siblings fell into a weird groove together, and had complex relationships with the world. I liked that it showcased a culture and how it (literally in this case) follows you, even if you don't see yourself as the main part of it. That felt super American to me? Possibly UK and other places started by colonization and intense immigration feel similarly, where no matter how many generations it's been or how long it's been since you did a ritual, you're still pegged as that culture in some ways.

I also thought the writing was beautiful, a fairytale in a fairytale.

For me, the one thing I didn't love was the ghost element. I wanted there to be more. The intense feelings of impropriety made it uncomfortable for me to accept them.

[Sarah]

I absolutely loved this book. I particularly loved the idea of stories having their own life. There was the Long Shadow Man, but also the way they kept the story alive in the end with the puppet show. And I'm glad that Bellatine embraced her gift in the end.

I really did not like Isaac at all. I understand the trauma that made him who he was, but he was not a likeable character. I'm glad that he stuck it out in the end instead of running, though. That he bore witness, and that he used his own gift to help.

What did everyone thing of Winnie? She was such a fully realized character for someone originally made of stone. It was funny when she was talking about "her" life and identified so strongly with the original Winnifred.

I've also always been curious about Baba Yaga, so I enjoyed hearing the intermission sections from her/the house's POV.

[Trude]

We get to know the house a bit better, how it was hatched, and that it is very restless.
We soon learn that Isaac is a very restless person. He sounds like he belongs with this house. But Bellatine is the one who states that,

“I want this house. I really want this house.”

Later we learn that Bellatine has some powers she is utterly fearful of, she can make the puppets dance on their own, but it hurts her. She calls her power Embering, and the old dolls, when sent from their parents, scare her and give her flashbacks and she fears that she will be hurt again. To some extent Thistlefoot counters the effects of the dolls, it soothes and calms her like she has never experienced before. No wonder she wants this house!

The way the chapter about the Longshadow Man was written (chapter 5) gave me strong remembrance of American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

There is very much crammed a bit too tight in the novel, the reader is flooded with stuff that might have fared better than falling to the floor, if some sharp knife had cut a little bit off here and there. I understand the writer’s drive and joy in filling facts into cracks and crannies, but sometimes it can be too overwhelming for a reader who is simply looking for enjoyable entertainment.

The language is fresh, intriguing, and rich. The style is poetic. The writer tries to make all the people alive to us, and she succeeds to a certain degree. Both Isaac and Bellatine are wounded souls, alone in their pain, alienated from each other, only united by Thistlefoot.

What was particularly noticeable was the difference between Bellatine and Isaac. She gives with her power, she gives life. But she is terrified by it, hurt by it. So she does all she can to avoid using her power. Isaac on the other hand, he steals with his power, steals other identities - lives. And he is hurt when not using his power, he gets insane migraines. He also enjoys his power, revels in it, feels empowered and elevated by it, he is above the others. These powers, supernatural and beyond most common abilities, are like a godly gift or curse. “Is it a blessing or is it a curse?” At the same time, they are both very lonely and outcasts. Isaac makes others believe he has chosen it himself, that his otherness is voluntary. Bellatine tries to hide her otherness, in order to belong. Both these survival tactics are flawed in their own ways and only hide the symptoms, they do nothing to alleviate the pain.

In the end catharsis is found! I am rarely moved so much by a book as I was with Thistlefoot. A recommended read!

[Olga]

The story was quite interesting and I really enjoyed Thistlefoot's POV. The house really did have a personality and sprung to life in my imagination. And it made its story that much sadder in the end.

It was difficult for me though to disassociate what I know about slavic folklore I grew up on from the story. It felt wrong to read about Baba Yaga as a jew living in XX century and I had constantly to remind myself that it's some other realm, that it's fantasy. But even so, I feel that it's not exactly right to just take a folklore character, strip it from every meaning and symbolism and shoehorn it into a totally different personality just for the story's sake. I don't see why it had to be Baba Yaga specifically. Why choose such a recognisable image and then ignore almost everything that made it unique?
In the last part of Thistlefoot's story this was a bit addressed to. But the revelation that it was not THE Baba Yaga of my childhood tales, but just a girl with a nickname, didn't help. I still cannot reconciliate the two images. I think I understand what was the author's intention, it just didn't work for me. Cultural interference, maybe.

[Bonnie]

At Chapter 30 / 57%

Sometimes struck by some lovely passages:

This was how Isaac lived. Part of your life one moment, gone the next, and taking what he wanted. Bellatine hadn’t seen his vanishings from this angle before, hadn’t seen what became of Isaac after disappearing. When she was young, she used to imagine he hadn’t left at all, but rather had become something…else. Scattered rain on her windowsill. A bank of gray fog in the middle school parking lot. The whistle of a train, fading in the distance. Not a brother who’d abandoned her. A presence, rather than an absence. But here he was. Solid. Breathing. Winging through the crowd with the conviction of a falcon on the hunt. From Isaac’s perspective, Max and Nina were the fog, now, thin and bodiless enough to walk right through. Like they’d never existed. Was that how he’d thought of her, too?

“Couldn’t find much on the shtetl she referenced—Gedenkrovka. Seemed like a barely there sort of town. But I did find mention of a pogrom in December 1919, enforced by the official Russian army. Pretty much wiped out or displaced the whole Jewish population.”
“Gedenkrovka.” Isaac tested the village’s name in his mouth. It felt clumsy and serrated, the sounds struggling to settle on his tongue. Strange that, to generations of his blood, this word must have tasted familiar. Tasted like belonging.

[Olga]

I tried to find Gedenkrovka as well, but it seems that it doesn't actually exist. I found only Vladimirovka in Cherkassy region. The book says that it was somewhere near there.

Pogroms were actually one of the darkest pages of Russian history, but I don't remember that there were whole villages where only jews lived (I might be mistaken). What comes to my mind is cities like Odessa where there were districts mostly populated by jews and that they were ransacked during pogroms.

That is actually the thing that annoys me the most about the book. I feel that the author took very sensitive part of history and a folklore character and just mixed everything up. To me it feels like disrespect to the source material.

[HeyT]

I was invested at the beginning and interested to see where the narrative was going but it sort of lost me around the 60% mark. I don't think I was in the right space to read about so much trauma because current events are exhausting and I feel like I need more escapism in my reading at the moment.

[Cynda]

I found this article worthwhile, a description where folklore and fantasy meet.

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/08/112699...

I am a descendent of a wide variety of ethnicities, including Sephardic Jews who were kicked out of Spain, so some similarities of catastrophic leavetaking, and I could see some Jewish ways of being on generations older than me and a very few ways in me too. This book showed me a healing of the past in a fantastical way.

It is the healing that makes this novel worthwhile for me. The path is not always clear. The process is not easy. The effort often is worthwhile. I love the folktale, history, and fantasy of this book.

[Cynda]

a Quote I particularly liked.
from Chapter 38

Ask a question, and a endless map of potential unfurls before you. North, south, east, west, an interstate of unknowings, each with their own exits and truck stops and bends in the roads. You can wander along a question your whole life and never need to stop.

(a holy ignorance)

[Bonnie]

https://youtu.be/7pk9m6zGJVE?si=3pWVl...

Presentation at a bookfair.
Gennarose Nethercott shows up at 57:45, then on til the end. She speaks at the lectern three times, and presents her story /stagecraft three times, speaking as Thistlefoot:
1) birth of Thistlefoot the House
2) birth of Baba Yaga's daughters
3) Baba Yaga's tale of cutting down the skeleton

(She does mention that she made Baba Yaga Jewish.) There's the house with props; cranked illuminated shadow screens; and one puppet.

[Cynda]

Oh Bonnie what a delight! Did the stagecraft look like that in the article I link two posts above?

[Jessica]

The quote that hit me was :
"A mob has no ears to call to, only a single mouth, yelling.
A mob has no hands to hold, only a finger, pointing.
A mob has no head, only a single body, guideless, acting as it will."

Having experienced mobs from a variety of viewpoints, I'd have to say this is about the best description.

[Paul]

I enjoyed this book, and there is a lot of great things about it but it didn't hang 100% together for me. I was unsatisfied by the ending. I felt cheated as a reader that to defeat the Longshadow Man they had to do exactly the Longshadow Man's only objective. Still, I loved Bellatine as a character, and wish it was her story alone. I was sad that she thought she was a monster and happy that she was about come to terms with her powers and wish she could have got to live her happy life at the end in Thistlefoot. I did not enjoy the sections with Isaac. He felt underdeveloped and under used, as did Shona and the rest of bus gang. Why was the way Benji died such a big deal to Isaac? The way I read it, it was a complete accident, so would have been good to delve more into why he thought it was his fault. I also wanted a lot more for Winnifred as I was really interested in her as a concept and character.

I know virtually nothing about the backstory of Baby Yaga but it did make me want to find out more.

[Cynda]

I saw that quote Jessica and thought it was very apt--true and truly scary.

[Kaia]

Finished this today. I thought the writing itself was compelling, and there were many times I stopped to marvel at a sentence or description - like the one about mobs shared in the discussion above. The author using the story to examine the impacts of trauma and the healing process was also interesting. I really liked the characters of Bellatine, Winnifred, and Thistlefoot, and I also thought the strained sibling relationship between Bellatine and Isaac was well done.

There were some things that didn't hang together for me that others have mentioned. Like Paul, I was a little mystified by how Benji's death made Isaac feel so guilty. Isaac kept hinting that the death was due to his negligence or his not being reliable, but the death was so clearly an accident. (I have to admit, though, that I disliked Isaac's character and the way he manipulated others - he was very believable as that kind of character, however.)

To address the question of Gedenkrovka earlier in the discussion, I did see in the author's acknowledgments that Gedenkrovka is a fictional place based on the real village of Rotmistrivka in Ukraine.

[Cynda]

I think we were supposed to understand that Isaac and Benji might have had romantic feelings or sexual relationship.

Those of my generation will remember the Boy George song "Karma Chameleon" where the man is upset that his lover changes colors like a chameleon & comes and goes at will.

[Bonnie]

Cynda is healing 2024 wrote: "Oh Bonnie what a delight! Did the stagecraft look like that in the article I link two posts above?"

I had to go read the article you posted before answering.... YES. Doubtless the same house.
People who really liked the book, or are interested in the puppetry, go check out the the author in the video above (Message #15).

I liked it overall. Some of the passages were beautiful and moving. Some of the story resonated for me.
It is a shame that (as someone mentioned above) they had to do what the Longshadow Man wanted, instead of fight him... and then they lost the house instead of saving it.

I did have a harder time losing myself in the story. I think because a) old-timey vibe set in our present did not mesh for me; b) I don't really believe in the chicken feet and Longshadow Man! But I like how it evoked the immigrant experience, and problems in humanity's history.

Things it made me think of:
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon
The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern

For people newer to the SFFBC group, we do have some other Russian-ish-fairytale-ish-inspired books on the shelf:
The Bear and the Nightingale - Katherine Arden
The Raven and the Reindeer - T. Kingfisher
Spinning Silver - Naomi Novik

[Ellen]

Finished it today. I liked it though I was really creeped out at times. I'm sorry there are plenty of smoked filled in the world driven by fear and hate.
One thing I know is if a stranger pulls a little bottle out of his pocket and wants me to bring it, I'm passing.

[Cynda]

Thank you Bonnie. My attention on door stopper book challenges held my attention. Some of these books and writers I know of. Neil Gaiman is a favorite, yet I have to read American Gods. Another group I read with is reading Neverwhere..