Into the Bloodred Woods
by Martha Brockenbrough
High School    Scholastic    368 pp.    g
11/21    978-1-338-67387-6    $18.99
e-book ed.  978-1-338-67389-0    $11.99

In this fantasy novel with threads drawn from fairy tales (the non-Disney-fied ones, with all the gore, and then some), Albrecht is the king’s son, but his twin, Ursula, is the firstborn, setting the siblings in competition for the throne. Following their parents’ deaths, Hans and Greta, the woodcutter’s children, are taken against their will to serve in the palace, Greta to butcher animals in the kitchen, Hans as the apprentice—and torture subject—of Albrecht, who wants to build mechanical men not subject to the weaknesses of flesh and blood. Capella, who is Albrecht and Ursula’s cousin, loves Hans, whom she knows in his werewolf form. Sabine, a werebear, loves Ursula but hates the monarchy. When the king dies, Albrecht is able to stage a coup, drive out Ursula, and seize Greta as his unwilling bride. The frailty of bodies; the unnaturalness of medical experimentation; the vulnerability of women in a patriarchal world; and the disturbingly grotesque nature of torture, pain, and ­mutilation—these images recur throughout the story, which mixes magic and woodland folkloric elements with horror and steampunk. Readers may journey through Brockenbrough’s (The Game of Love and Death, rev. 5/15) compelling tale with a growing sense of dread, but they’ll likely be unable to put it down.

From the March/April 2022 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.