Nettle & Bone
by T. Kingfisher
Summary
Marra is the third daughter of a small kingdom that survives because a larger neighbour wants its harbour. Her eldest sister was married to the northern prince and died. Her second sister was married to him next and is being beaten, and is expected to produce an heir before she can be discarded too. Marra was put in a convent so she could not complicate the succession.
At thirty she decides to kill the prince, and is told she may do so if she completes three impossible tasks: build a dog out of bones, spin a cloak of nettles, and catch moonlight in a jar. She does all three, because they are difficult rather than impossible, and the book begins in a bone field with her wiring a dog together.
The party she assembles is the pleasure of it. A dust wife who keeps a demon in a hen, a disgraced former knight, a fairy godmother whose gift is unreliable, and the bone dog, who is a very good dog. They go to the goblin market, and to a place where the dead are stored, and eventually to a christening.
Marra is the anti heroine the book needs. She is not brave, not trained, not chosen, and not young. She is a woman in her thirties who is good at embroidery, notices things, and keeps going because nobody else is going to, and Kingfisher lets competence at ordinary tasks be the thing that saves everyone.
It is short, under three hundred pages, and its fairy tale logic is played completely straight, which is what makes the domestic violence at its centre land as hard as it does. The prince is not a monster in disguise. He is a charming man who hurts his wives and whom no institution will stop.
Funny, grim and kind at once. Best for readers who want a fairy tale for adults with no whimsy in it, and a very good introduction to a prolific writer.
Historical Context & Significance
Nettle & Bone won the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Novel at the Chengdu Worldcon, the first Worldcon held in China.
That ceremony became the largest administrative scandal in the award's history. When the nomination statistics were finally published in January 2024, several works and people had been ruled ineligible without explanation, among them R.F. Kuang's Babel, Xiran Jay Zhao and the fan writer Paul Weimer. Chengdu's own progress report had said voters should select works complying with local laws and regulations, wording found nowhere in the World Science Fiction Society constitution. The Hugo administrator Dave McCarty and the Worldcon Intellectual Property board chair Kevin Standlee both resigned, and McCarty was censured. None of it reflects on the winners, who were chosen by the voters.
T. Kingfisher is the adult fiction name of Ursula Vernon, who writes children's books and comics under her own name.