Book review: Nettle and Bone

Wiki tells me that Nettle & Bone is a 2022 fantasy novel by Ursula Vernon, writing as T. Kingfisher. The novel has been described as a dark fairy tale. It won the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Novel. It is, somewhat self-consciously, indeed a fairy-story-esque novel; "dark" is doubtful; the tone is almost always light and fluffy, and there is a reasonable sprinkling of gentle humour. I don't think it is as good as Uprooted or Spinning Silver but in its own way it is charming. As a negative the prose doesn't quite live up to the story.

I picked this up almost in despair at finding anything in Waterstones that I wanted to read, and found myself enjoying it in its various aspects. For one example, the Fairy Godmother who is weak and near useless only because she refuses to use her real talent for cursing people, and who finally comes into her own at the end when she slips in a "will grow up fatherless" curse on the child.

Some of the Goodreads reviews get a touch carried away about the story being "about" the oppression of women or somesuch; that's an element in the story but really, I think, just an element of the story.