DAUGHTER OF THE FOREST: Book 1 (The Sevenwaters Trilogy)

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This year, I was lucky enough to be chosen as an active participant (rather than just read a retelling for myself). He, too, learned to ride and to wield a sword, but more often than not you’d find him helping to deliver a calf or tending a prize bull gored by a rival. One of the worst trials Sorcha undergoes, is her casually brutal rape by two men whilst living alone in the forest. Indeed, I first read it in 2015, just a few days before flying to America to spend Christmas with her family where I got engaged.

Set in a mythological Ireland when Druids still held the upper hand against expanding Christendom and Fair Folk still meddled in the lives of mortals, Daughter of the Forest is a retelling of the “Six Swans” fairy tale. One spring, looking for the tiny green frogs that appeared as soon as the first warmth was in the air, my brothers and I splashed knee deep in the stream, making enough noise between us to frighten any creature away. For there are invaders outside the forest; raiders from across the seas, Britons and Vikings bent on destruction.Change is inevitable, though, and once Sorcha and her brothers were into their early twenties and teens, their father decided to remarry. However, because Richard, (Red's uncle), has her guarded so securely, he goes to find Red, (who is off rescuing Simon), instead. In a short space of time, Marillier has given us enough information to care about each one of Sorcha’s brothers and be upset at their fate. Going along with this, the story’s politics has a wonderfully small immediacy to it, a world where a lord is as much an agricultural planner, community leader and magistrate as commander or ruler.

Liadan is an exceptionally talented healer who is also supernaturally gifted; receiving sporadic visions of the present and future, able to hear and see beings of the Otherworld, and she has also inherited her mother's ability to communicate silently, mind-to-mind, with her twin brother Sean.Sorcha is the first daughter of seven children but unfortunately not the the seventh son her father wanted.

And seeing the world through Sorcha’s eyes, the strength of these women were highlighted all the more, Sorcha’s inner monologue presenting how her own opinions adapt based on their actions. A retelling of the fairy tale The Six Swans (alternatively known as The Twelve Brothers or other titles), Daughter of the Forest follows Sorcha and her six brothers. Lady Oonagh does not appear until three hours through a twenty hour novel, and though the preceding events (disconnected though they initially seem), have a great relevance later, there is no denying that even Marillier’s descriptive style is rather ponderous. The first obvious way in which the story expanded, is that rather than being set in a non specific semi-medieval land of princesses and castles, this is very much a tale of the forests of Ireland.I was introduced to Juliet Marillier’s Daughter of the Forest by the fabulous Felicia Day and her Vaginal Fantasy Bookclub. Throughout the novel, it is her task to break her brothers' spell, and she can only do so if she sews a shirt for each of them out of a brittle, needle-like plant that causes her hands to wrinkle and deform like that of an old woman's.

Behind him, a breeze stirred the branches of oak and elm, ash and elder, and scattered a drift of leaves, gold and bronze and brown. She will find kindness in unlikely places, face threats both subtle and savage, see how narrow the distance is between friend and foe, and learn that love might in the end prove the greatest magic of all.Maybe it was the flowery language or the very drawn-out scenes but it was never one of those books for me that I could crawl into and dissapear in for a while. And never a word they said to my oldest brothers, when they came home, about what a foolish girl I’d been. After decades as Ciaran's familiar, his story wins the sympathy of Padriac's daughter, the fierce Aisha who is visiting for the first time from norseland Xixón. And all of them had their moment of defiance against the patriarchy, or their moment of standing up in solidarity to what’s right.