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A review by mxhermit
White Stag by Kara Barbieri
Did not finish book.
Content/Trigger Warnings: blood, assault, torture, violence, brutal death, mutilation, sexual assault & rape, self harm
DNF @ 29%
We're all monsters...
Janneke, a human girl born the last in a long line of daughters, was raised to be her family's male heir. Instead, a brutal tragedy took place and she was stolen away by goblins to the Permafrost. One hundred years later and the Hunt is about to begin, a terrifying ordeal to choose the next Goblin King. What will this mean for Janneke's place, in this world where she's becoming something neither wholly human nor wholly goblin but scorned by both? Find out in Kara Barbieri's debut novel, White Stag.
I'd like to thank the team at Wednesday Books for inviting me to take part in the blog tour for White Stag and congratulate Kara on her debut novel hitting shelves.
The concept of the Wild Hunt, of the Goblin King's court, and of Janneke's upbringing as the last daughter/male heir drew me to this story because individually they sounded intriguing and together could have been even better. The combination sounded like the start of a potential magnificent fantasy, though that wasn't quite what I found myself reading.
I think there's an audience that may well enjoy this book, getting further into it and the depths that the characters get to, whether through thought or deed. I would advise checking out content/trigger warnings because it did get heavy at times for a variety of reasons, so there's that to consider.
Personally, I wasn't quite comfortable reading it first and foremost because of what I viewed as the forced romantic setup between Janneke and Soren, the goblin lord who is her master.
When Janneke was first kidnapped after her family was slaughtered, she was brutalized by Soren's uncle and then cast aside to Soren's ownership. While he may well be a special, not-like-other-goblins in his own right, this is still an enormous power imbalance that was very unsettling, particularly with his continual use of lines that pushed her to give in to her body's changes via Permafrost adaptation into goblin-hood, as it were. Whenever Janneke would use the word companionship, and there were more than a few, it really drove home the feeling that I was witnessing a magical kind of Stockholm Syndrome and it wasn't pleasant.
Janneke as a person was a bit contradictory. Her tone from one moment to the next didn't seem to match up with her actions or even her internal thoughts, so understanding her was difficult, the other characters even less so. Soren barely seemed to act like a goblin, aside from some of physical attributes, and Lydian, the disgusting goblin that brutally assaulted Janneke during her first six months in the Permafrost, acted like an insane, petulant child when we meet him in the beginning of the book.
Which brings me to the issue of timing. White Stag takes place one hundred years after Janneke's abduction to the Permafrost, which makes sense because of the author's desire to have an established connection between her and Soren. However, by doing so and starting the action in the middle of the opening scenes at the Erlking's palace, it feels like the reader gets no history to connect them to the story. It just plops us in there and expects us to care about a political system and a people, both with complicated rules, without answering: why?
It's a pity that I couldn't enjoy a Goblin King fantasy more. While White Stag wasn't what I was expecting, I expect that there will be people who may like Janneke's tracking skill, hunting across the icy lands in search of the Stag.
DNF @ 29%
We're all monsters...
Janneke, a human girl born the last in a long line of daughters, was raised to be her family's male heir. Instead, a brutal tragedy took place and she was stolen away by goblins to the Permafrost. One hundred years later and the Hunt is about to begin, a terrifying ordeal to choose the next Goblin King. What will this mean for Janneke's place, in this world where she's becoming something neither wholly human nor wholly goblin but scorned by both? Find out in Kara Barbieri's debut novel, White Stag.
I'd like to thank the team at Wednesday Books for inviting me to take part in the blog tour for White Stag and congratulate Kara on her debut novel hitting shelves.
The concept of the Wild Hunt, of the Goblin King's court, and of Janneke's upbringing as the last daughter/male heir drew me to this story because individually they sounded intriguing and together could have been even better. The combination sounded like the start of a potential magnificent fantasy, though that wasn't quite what I found myself reading.
I think there's an audience that may well enjoy this book, getting further into it and the depths that the characters get to, whether through thought or deed. I would advise checking out content/trigger warnings because it did get heavy at times for a variety of reasons, so there's that to consider.
Personally, I wasn't quite comfortable reading it first and foremost because of what I viewed as the forced romantic setup between Janneke and Soren, the goblin lord who is her master.
When Janneke was first kidnapped after her family was slaughtered, she was brutalized by Soren's uncle and then cast aside to Soren's ownership. While he may well be a special, not-like-other-goblins in his own right, this is still an enormous power imbalance that was very unsettling, particularly with his continual use of lines that pushed her to give in to her body's changes via Permafrost adaptation into goblin-hood, as it were. Whenever Janneke would use the word companionship, and there were more than a few, it really drove home the feeling that I was witnessing a magical kind of Stockholm Syndrome and it wasn't pleasant.
Janneke as a person was a bit contradictory. Her tone from one moment to the next didn't seem to match up with her actions or even her internal thoughts, so understanding her was difficult, the other characters even less so. Soren barely seemed to act like a goblin, aside from some of physical attributes, and Lydian, the disgusting goblin that brutally assaulted Janneke during her first six months in the Permafrost, acted like an insane, petulant child when we meet him in the beginning of the book.
Which brings me to the issue of timing. White Stag takes place one hundred years after Janneke's abduction to the Permafrost, which makes sense because of the author's desire to have an established connection between her and Soren. However, by doing so and starting the action in the middle of the opening scenes at the Erlking's palace, it feels like the reader gets no history to connect them to the story. It just plops us in there and expects us to care about a political system and a people, both with complicated rules, without answering: why?
It's a pity that I couldn't enjoy a Goblin King fantasy more. While White Stag wasn't what I was expecting, I expect that there will be people who may like Janneke's tracking skill, hunting across the icy lands in search of the Stag.