“If you combed through enough fairy tales, untangled their roots, and shook out their branches, you would find that they are infested with oaths. Oaths are brittle things, not unlike an egg. Though they go by different names depending on the myth–troths and gets, vows and tynged–there is one thing they all share: they must be broken for there to be a story. Only a shattered promise yields a rich, glittering yoke of a tale.”

This is a book to pore over. It is a book that makes you want to trace your fingers along each line, coaxing the words into your fingertips, just to bring your digits up to puckered lips and suck the ink dry, savoring each flavorful drop of meaning.

It holds a power in its pages, one of enchanting intoxication. If it’s possible to get drunk on words alone, this book is the god’s nectar to your everyday literary watered-down wine. It’s simultaneously luxurious like a rose and sharp like a thorn, its wit as enscorcelling and impressive as its characters’.

By thematically weaving together tales such as Bluebeard, Eros and Psyche, Catskins, Beauty and the Beast, and more, Chokshi explores a liminal unease found between reality and fantasy, truth and lie, promises bound and broken. This book is a catalog of ghost and story through gothic prose, and in its own way, a thesis on the lessons of fairytales and the danger of the power they hold. Or rather the power we have to hold them. What is love if not fear? What is devotion if not sacrifice? What is a fairytale if not a weapon and a warning in one?

This book utters itself like a secret. And though like all secrets, it is meant to be spilled, its knowledge, also like with all secrets, comes with a sacrifice. It is not given freely, but earned through the effort of reading it. This story is to me: fragile, intangible, a whisper declared to the heart. And to attempt to clumsily summarize it in words or break its spell with the utterance of its particulars seems to me nothing short of blasphemous.

But I can say: THE LAST TALE OF THE FLOWER BRIDE is a brand new favorite of mine and its praises will be living on the tip of my tongue for a VERY long time. I was absolutely captivated by its purple prose and drawn in by its deconstruction of fairytale motifs. I fell in love with its gothic atmosphere and haunting cast of characters (including a hair-raising house), and felt a little too seen in its depiction of homoerotic codependent friendships between young girls (I didn’t know In A Week by Hozier could be known like this). But mostly, I left it believing in just a little more magic than I did when my journey into its pages began. And isn’t that what the goal of reading is? To emerge in a cloud of bibliosmia, stretching our limbs and rubbing our eyes and upon reacquainting ourselves with our reality, to find that when we weren’t looking, some unnameable thing from the depths of the story has nuzzled its way into our soul, leaving the world looking (or perhaps feeling) just a little bit different than it was before? To be inexplicably, indefinably, but undeniably changed?

CW: loss of sibling (past), blood and gore, animal death, abusive relationship, abusive parent, bullying, alcohol consumption, drugging, self-harm (for magic), parental death (past), character death, dead body, cannibalism, tooth horror (light), sexual content,