Book Review: Juniper & Thorn By Ava Reid

Mikayla Leskey | Arts and Entertainment Editor

Juniper & Thorn by Ava Reid is a retelling that you’ve never known you needed. It’s a gothic retelling of The Juniper Tree, where a boy is murdered by this stepmother who cooks him and feeds him to his father. The boy’s sister buries his bones under a juniper tree and he’s reborn as a magical bird. Eventually it leads him to kill his stepmother and bring him back to life, but this retelling, it’s something you wouldn’t expect out of this short blurb of The Juniper Tree.

Instead of an evil stepmother, it’s an evil wizard dad, who is so protective over his three daughters he never lets them leave the house, forcing them to sneak out. The main character, Marlinchen is the youngest and ugliest of her sisters, “I was ugly in the most forgettable sense, like the unmatched silverware in a drawer, the dull knife that your hand passed over without your brain supplying a reason why.” (Reid, Juniper & Thorn, pg. 66) and we read her first venture out into the dying city of Oblya. They go to the theatre, where Marlinchen meets a boy. 

Of course, this boy, Sevastyan,(Sevas for short), makes her, for the first time, want to rebel against her dictator of a father. Marlinchen constantly sneaks out at night to meet up with Sevas, going against everything that she was told to do, and that is only the start of this book.

It continues with grotesque body horror and cannibalism, the daughters rebelling against their father, but not before his dictatorship absolutely consumes them. But with Reid’s writing, they’re able to seamlessly blend fantasy and horror together, creating a type of beauty out of the body horror they write about. It’s like a constant reminder that even though roses are considered the most beautiful flower, they do also have thorns. 

It’s in the way she writes about a parentified eldest daughter, and the forced chef of Marlinchen, it constantly leaves you wondering when will they get rid of their father? All of their feelings about him are constantly known, so why haven’t they killed him yet? Or are they just waiting for his all-consume curse to finally starve him?

During all this, the plot with their dad and so on, there’s a subplot of bodies constantly being found, adding an eerie undertone to the story. Eventually we figure out that that subplot is more important than it seems. It’s where part of the old The Juniper Tree comes in, because all those bodies are being killed by a winged-monster. One we eventually figure out who it is, but I’m not going to spoil that for you. 

Juniper & Thorn is a deeply twisted book with body horror after body horror and chapters that need trigger warnings. It’s perfect for a Halloween reading, it’ll leave you disturbed but wondrously engaged with the book, eager to read what’s next and maybe even follow Ava Reid herself and read the rest of her books as well.