A ageing soldier devoted to his lord, a young lady about to lose her illusions, and another young woman who’s never had many illusions to lose, all find their way to a path in the woods leading to a castle whose inhabitants may not want them to leave, in this Gothic, medieval-inspired, Eastern-European fantastic tale.

This book confused me, but I don’t think it’s the author’s fault at all. The story is split into three different perspectives, and you discover the characters without introduction. You’re given little time to find your bearings before things start taking a dark turn for them. While this type of opening won’t bother many readers used to plot-based fantasy & science-fiction, it made things a little difficult for me, who tend to prefer character-based stories that take their time establishing the stakes & world-building.

That being said, I really enjoyed the snippets of folklore interspersed throughout the story. I would even have enjoyed a bit more, but I appreciated the fact that the author rooted her novel in this fictional, yes, but quite realistic world. It is a dark one, especially in terms of sexual violence (see the content warnings).

The blurb was slightly misleading because what it describes doesn’t happen before you’re about one third into the story, which added to my confusion. There was also a timeline thing that wasn’t clear, but I loved the way each character has a different experience of time passing. The way we saw some of them through the eyes of the others was also very well done in my opinion. This novel really delivered on the structure with different strands slowly getting braided together, which is a feature I really love in books.

On the whole, I remain quite confused by this book and would be hard pressed to recount the narrative in detail, but I’d recommend it for fans of G.R.R. Martin with a Gothic and folkloric touch.