Daughter of the Forest

by Juliet Marillier

Reviewed by Coral

When I was a kid, I read a children’s story based on the Grimm’s Fairy Tale Six Swans. In this story, a girl’s six brothers are turned into swans while she is cursed to remain mute until she can undo the curse on her brothers. Her brothers can only turn back into men briefly (I can’t remember if it was once a year or only at night) and will be trapped as swans until she finishes weaving them shirts made of nettles. Eventually her silence as well as her unusual task draws whispers and accusations of sorcery. As she is being brought to the stake to be burnt, her brothers as swans fly around her and she throws the shirts on them, breaking the curse (save for the youngest brother, who is left with one arm as a wing).

This book is a retelling of this story. It’s set in Ireland, as the British are starting to move into the land. Sorcha is the seventh child of a powerful Irish lord. But when her brothers’ are cursed by their new step-mother, she loses everything and is condemned to a painful, silent, lonely existence as she weaves the shirts that will break the curses on all of them.

I liked the story I read as a child better. Or maybe I liked the memory of the story I read as a child. I didn’t end up finishing this book.

Grade: NA