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218 pages, Hardcover
First published October 16, 2018
"I help those I can. Those who stray into the wood and deserve helping."
"Do I deserve helping?"
"Of course you do, poor thing. How could you even ask?"
"It seemed easy to ask."
"You are tired."
"Some I saw this day were not helped."
"Not all deserve it. And need to be shown they don't belong here. That it is no longer their woods. Not anymore."
The honey was delicious, heavy gold with marks of comb and only here or there a leg or wing or who knows what else that had been pulled into the trickling swamp.
”I must go home when we have finished our meal together.”
“Straightaway home?”
“I cannot linger.”
“It must be very pleasant where you live. You must miss all that you have made there.”
“My husband has said that one day we will ring our house with roses and take our drink from golden cups.”
“And does he keep his promises, your good man?”
“As much as any other. We both do.”
“Then of course you can’t linger, Goody,” said Eliza. “Of course you can’t.”
"What have you given him? What did I give you?"
"You gave me a scream. One grown special in dark water, fed by word, dusted by night."
"A scream?"
"I am letting him warm it for us and show its worth. Let's see how very loud and lovely we can make him, shall we?"
The world, I told him, was a grand thing as long as you stepped straight and kept to your course. If you did not, the world would hurt you. Or it would make you hurt yourself. He said he knew that already. I told him he did not know it in the way that I did.
Thank you NetGalley and Little Brown and Company for the arc in exchange for my honest review.
"Once upon a time there was and there wasn't a woman who went to the woods... Now why did she go?"
"Why did she go?"
"Why did she go and what did she do?"
"Went down to the stream and took off her shoe."
"And before that?"
"Set off from her house in a bonnet blue."
"Now tell me, what did she rue?"
...
"What did she rue?"
I told her I was astonished for I had meant even until the opening of my lips to speak of my face and how pleased it had made me to look upon it. My fairness as a child had ever worried my mother. If someone remarked upon the sheen of my hair, she cut it off. If someone said my teeth shone lovely, she told me to keep my mouth closed the next time I went abroad or she would reach into the hearth and rub them black. When the dress she had made me came to fit too closely and the eyes around me became too hungry, she tore it off me and made me wear a sack. She had given me the mirror to ensure I stayed plain and said I must never pinch at my cheeks or bite at my lips and I must take in slow breaths whenever my color rose. Once a woman at market in a wide-brimmed black hat to which she had pinned a single deep red rose turned her head to me and told me I was a lovely thing. She held my gaze longer than I could bear and when my cheeks began to burn as red as her rose, I bent my head and thanked our Lord that it was my father and not my mother standing there.I will probably read more by Hunt because I am intrigued. I'm not going to say I got everything that happened in this book, but for one I was able to crank out in a read in one day, it has still stuck with me which is unusual. Not so much the story itself, but the feeling of unease after having read it. Which is a telltale sign, for me, of a good psychological horror novel.
(p54)