The January Book Club – The Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher

Join us on January 18th at 7PM ET to discuss T. Kingfisher’s novel The Seventh Bride!

The Seventh Bride is a Bluebeard retelling, but it’s also so much more – it brilliantly plays with all kinds of familiar fairy-tale tropes and centralizes the importance of female friendship and support.

Also, it’s wildly creative, decidedly creepy, and weirdly heart-warming at times.

If this isn’t enough to convince you, T. Kingfisher (the pen name Ursula Vernon uses to distinguish her more adult-themed work from the children’s lit and middle grade she publishes under her legal name) won TWO Hugo awards last week, which is amazing and super well-deserved!

NPR compares The Seventh Bride favorably to Peter Beagle and Diana Wynne Jones, writing:

“Stylistically, Seventh Bride is stripped-down and straightforward, wasting little space on elaborate scene-setting. That bluntness is appropriate to [the protagonist]’s perspective as an uneducated peasant whose most significant experience of the world involves fighting a bullying swan for her daily lunch. So it’s a surprise that Bride most closely resembles Peter Beagle’s elegant, poetic novel The Last Unicorn, with its phantasmagoria of witches, nobles, sorcerers, and great powers. (The two books even share a key image, in the form of a magical and not entirely physical clock.) Vernon has Beagle’s knack for creating colorful, instantly memorable characters, and inhuman creatures capable of inspiring awe and wonder. For that matter, Vernon sometimes feels like Diana Wynne Jones’ heir, with her stories of aggrieved heroes trying to bull their way through comic magical chaos.”

We CAN’T WAIT to talk about this glorious novel with you! To join us, make sure you’re on the Willow tier or higher on our Patreon!