Most people have no idea goblins live in the woods around the small town of Bellwater, Washington. But some are about to find out. Skye, a young barista and artist, falls victim to a goblin curse in the forest one winter night, rendering her depressed and silenced, unable to speak of what happened. Her older sister, Livy, is at wit’s end trying to understand what’s wrong with her. Local mechanic … mechanic Kit would know, but he doesn’t talk of such things: he’s the human liaison for the goblin tribe, a job he keeps secret and never wanted, thrust on him by an ancient family contract.Then Kit starts dating Livy, and Skye draws Kit’s cousin Grady into the spell through an enchanted kiss in the woods. Skye and Grady are doomed to become goblins and disappear from humankind forever, unless Livy, the only one untainted by enchantment, can unravel the spell by walking a dangerous magical path of her own.
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“Everyone knew you shouldn’t go biting into fruit offered to you by magical creatures in the woods, even if you’d thought until just five minutes ago that such stories were, you know, only stories.”
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I really really liked this one!! It started a little slow, and I was afraid it’d be yet another disappointment (I seem to have hit a string of review books that just didn’t do anything for me lately, and it’s been a little depressing) but then it suddenly picked up and I was hooked from that moment through the end…
The eponymous goblins are horrid creatures, and the havoc they delight in wreaking is equally horrid. Kit Sylvain is tied to them by a generations-old curse that he bears no culpability – but all of the responsibility – for, and the book is largely the tale of his struggle to deal with that unfairness. Unfairness which is exacerbated, of course, by his feelings for the sister of the goblins’ latest victim – which are further exacerbated by said victim’s burgeoning “relationship” (curse-induced) with Kit’s cousin… It sounds crazy and soap-operish, but actually isn’t – it makes gloriously tangled sense in the course of the story, which is laid out with a lush opulence that is redolent of the book’s gorgeous cover art.
I was afraid the story would get maudlin and lose me for a little while… In the beginning, things are pretty bleak for Kit AND Skye (the victim), and I was wondering where on earth the remaining vast majority of the story could go if no one ever escaped the goblins and there was no hope for a happy ending. Of course, this is fiction – there’s always a possibility of escape AND of hope (particularly for happy endings) – and once that brief glimpse of opportunity presented itself, the story moved along at a superbly crisp pace that kept me anxiously turning pages.
The characters are endearing, even at their lowest points. The setting of Bellwater and its environs is perfect – damp, woodsy, gloomy, and laden with magical potential. And the story, while familiar, still offered enough unique twists and turns to keep me fully engaged and thoroughly entertained. I can’t ask for more than that! Ringle is definitely on my Authors To Watch list!
My review copy was provided by NetGalley.
This is a really fun read. Molly Ringle’s lush, almost lyrical descriptions of life on Puget Sound were a highlight of this book for me, but the rest is applause-worthy as well. It’s a sexy, funny and even frightening tale in which four people are caught up in a goblin’s curse. I won’t say more except that I fell in love with the two female characters and wanted to hang out with the men. And the book made me hungry, but you’ll have to find out why for yourself.
I have this deep and abiding love of Christina Rossetti, so when I saw that this was a modern adaptation of her poem The Goblin Market I had to squee. I really enjoyed this book. It sucked you in, and you had to keep reading because you really had no idea how this thing was going to pan out. Which is good because sometimes basing your novel off someone else’s work is predictable because we can see how they ended theirs. This is definitely not for kids, but then neither was the poem. I really want to read some of her other work now because Molly Ringle did a great job hanging onto the spirit of the Goblin Market while bringing the reader into the very modern Puget Sound.
Kept me up all night. I had to know what happened.
The first half is a bit snoozy, but the second half more than makes up for it. Original twist on paranormal/urban fantasy tropes in a beautiful setting.
Enjoyed while reading, but forgetable.