After the Forest by Kell Woods

Source: NetGalley – My thanks, as always, to the wonderful publisher!
TL;DR: A cold, disconnected story with a reactionary character, this was a frustrating read for me.

Plot: Hans and Greta having grown up after the gingerbread. Misogyny, fancy red hair, and witchcraft!
Characters: Hard pass on these guys, it was the greatest flaw for me. Cold and reactionary I didn’t like anyone
Setting: There wasn’t much depth to this. A few moments of beautiful scenery but I couldn’t picture this place with any unique flair
Magic: It was everywhere but we never really explored it in too much depth sadly. Very soft magic system.

Thoughts:

I genuinely was expecting something very different than what I got with this and I’m quite disappointed. For some reason I thought this was more modern, however this leans very hard into the fairy tale ‘retellings/what if’ stories we’ve been getting a lot of the past few years. Hans and Greta are now adults and this follows their lives as more supernatural beings begin to enter it and how they deal with life after ‘the witch’.

My biggest complaint on this is that Greta was just so bland. I’m not sure if this was due to the writing, which in general felt very disconnected and cold, or the character herself. Even after the traumatic events of her childhood, the frequent supernatural events that followed, and the magical book that talks to her in her own home daily she still manages to find shapeshifters and werewolves surprising and frightening. I believe I would have started having problems well before the book started whispering in my mind, but to each their own.

Sadly I spent the entirety of the book disconnected, cold to the characters and only growing more frustrated. Greta felt a lot like many female characters I read in these types of stories, reactionary and mild in manner. If you met these women on a Tuesday in the supermarket you’d never know. Which, if this was literary fiction then yeah I can see that making sense. But in a fantasy novel? A retelling of a fairy tale? It makes for a dull and frustrating time for the reader.

2.5 bewitching gingerbread houses