By about 10% into the book, I was reminded viscerally of The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden. When reviewing that book I focused on the idea of there being a special power in taking a known story and envisioning it in a new way. I’m firmly of the opinion that approaching storytelling that way – taking what has existed previously and viewing it another way – can lead to some inventive storytelling. There are any number of ways to approach it, and The Maiden and Her Monster goes about it by taking Jewish history and folktales, this case the Golem of Prague, and putting them into a blender, metaphorically, and then laying them over a fictional world not our own adding in mysticism to the mix. More often than not, that sort of blending creates an engaging experience waiting for the reader.
And that is true in The Maiden and Her Monster. I was initially engaged in the world Maddie Martinez created, in the characters that populated it, of how each section of the novel built into the next. But sometimes my engagement was caught on the things that jumped out as inconsistencies in the story. Our main character Malka is 23 years old, the eldest daughter of the local healer in a town that is falling prey to monsters and illness coming from the old growth woods surrounding the village. When more tragedy strikes Malka strikes a deal to save her mother by going into the woods to find the monster. That decision will lead her to Nimrah, the golem, and further into the threats facing her community. I kept coming back to the book not for Malka, but for that larger story.
There are some mechanics issues of a debut novel present here. From the first pages the characterization of Malka felt inconsistent. She is by all accounts an adult, but she acted and often thought in a very childlike manner. These inconsistencies also made me bump every time the vocabulary and overwritten sentence structure of the narration of her character would read as too far from the naive character Martinez wrote her to be. I also had a problem with the physical description of Nimrah – the same three or four aspects of her physicality were brought up repeatedly without layering in new insights. Which was troublesome when Malka’s attraction to her grows.
I went back several times to double check that this wasn’t YA, because the tone would occasionally swerve dramatically. For example, one of the recurring themes in the book is the law of unintended consequences. Sometimes this is woven in gently for the reader to suss out, and other times it was bluntly stated. But either way it, along with the other themes, was hammered in a way that made it tough for me to want to return to the book in the middle section. Not to mention that for much of the book there was not a single obstacle that Malka and the other characters came across that wasn’t immediately solved by luck or happenstance – rarely requiring any significant planning or plotting on their behalf. Another issue I had was that so much of the narrative was recognizable as culturally Jewish that the elements that were of the author’s creation stuck out or confused me. There is also quite a lot of terminology that is either religious or created and not all of it is easily understandable through context clues, and Martinez has a glossary on her website to accompany the book (I don’t know if it will make the print version, as I read an electronic ARC).
I received an ARC of this book from Tor Publishing via NetGalley. It has not effected the contents of the review, only its timing.
Bingo Square: Green. The (beautiful) cover features so much green, including the hue of Nimrah’s skin.